Thank you Ashley. Yes, I have researched the IP. It is from a block of IPs based in France and most of the block are listed in a number of blacklists and other reputation sites. There are other blocks, associated with this one all have a dodgy reputation. At the moment, I have set up a chain in iptables to label, log and dump these blocks.
A new one has appeared today, it was reported in the log as attempting to use a known hack on Apache. It only tried once, but it was hardly a friendly act. Research on it showed that it is in the range of IPs used by a certain UK SEO company, scraping sites for information to sell to its clients. This one was interesting though as it had no reports of actual harm except, one well respected RBL database noted that it had appeared yesterday linked to a malware installer. Hence, I suppose, the attempted hack attack. More blocking and monitoring!