church where excrement can then damage furnishings and sometimes irreplaceable objects of international significance, said experts.

'Pungent' shower

In some cases the colony can also restrict the use of a church for worship or other community functions.

Mr Thorp, who has been the rector at the church since 2006, said the "pungent" faeces and urine from the bats in the pitch of the church roof "showers down on anybody inside".

image copyright Norfolk Churches/St Andrew's Church image caption Bat guano falls from the ceiling to cover the church's interior

"This does an awful lot of damage and in the breeding season it's also possible for pubescent bats to fall from the roof onto the floor," he said.

Funded by Defra, researchers from Bristol University have been working at the Grade I listed building whichalong the shoreline of Lake Superior. Here's their own expert account of how ice volcanoes come into being: "Cones begin to form at the leading edge of the ice shelf as it builds out into the lake. When the waves, driven by strong onshore winds, feel bottom they build and break onto the ice shelf. After the ice shelf has built out, waves continue to travel underneath the ice and are forced up through cracks and previously formed cones."

Nor are the exotic cold-weather cones confined to our own humble planet. Space explorers have spotted ice volcanoes on several of the more icy moons in our solar system, including most recently on Saturn's Titan moon. Below is a video detailing the find by NASA's Cassini spacecraft:

And there, it seems,