Community Orchard

Pruning the Orchard - Published in K&S Courier 22.2.13

            There’s a thin smattering of snow covering the orchard.  The leafless trees are gaunt against the grey sky. There are a couple of thousand of them to prune and so far I’ve only done a couple of hundred. But it’s enjoyable and therapeutic work. Cutting back excess shoots and branches. Opening up the centre to let summer sunlight in. Creating that pleasing old-fashioned shape of full-standard apples.

            Myrtle enjoys herself keeping the sheep at bay and chasing the cuttings I throw.  Occasionally another dog is walked through.  Despite rebranding ourselves as a Community Orchard a couple of years ago, few people roam over our 50 acres.  And fewer still turn out on volunteer days to plant trees or pick apples or tidy woodland. It’s more than apathy. In some quarters there’s downright opposition to our existence.  I got a small grant from the Big Lottery Fund to replace rusting and ugly metal gates with traditional five-bar oak ones.  And I installed a pedestrian ‘kissing’ gate for easier public access.  Then someone complained to the council that we didn’t have planning permission!

            But that was nothing to the furore over our plans for a small pole barn to house tractor and tools.   You remember that scene in the Boris Karloff Frankenstein film when villages march on the castle with pitchforks and flaming torches? Well, even if it wasn’t quite as bad as that, it felt a bit like it.

            For years after the Orchard was “land-plotted” in the 1970s it remained derelict.  Brambles and rabbits abounded while trees died but the occasional nightingale sang.  Locals seemed to prefer that to attempts of a Plot Owners Association to clear the land, restore the mature trees and plant new ones.

            Utterly unrealistic fears of it being sold for housing estates or industrial units were raised. Our small barn was regarded as the thin end of this wedge.

            It’s proving hard to change hearts and minds but we’re determined.  It’s possibly the largest traditional apple orchard left in the South East and a fantastic repository of wild fauna and flora.  We want to open it up to as many people as possible so they too can enjoy this wonderful piece of landscape heritage. Our application for charitable status may allay some fears, but there’s clearly a way to go.  In the meantime eight hundred trees await my pruning saw.  Back to work …

kentcountrymatters.blogspot.co.uk/

Community Orchard

The Smuggler

Published in Courier Countryside Column  15 February 2013

Notwithstanding recent comments about firearms, I bought a gun the other day.  It’s unlikely to hurt anyone though, being an imitation 18^th century flintlock.  Nevertheless it looks quite authentic especially with the sword I got in a Hastings junkshop and the Tricorn hat and costume I bought on eBay.

I’d never have thought a year or so ago that I’d be making a prat of myself touring country pubs and National Trust tea rooms telling tales of long dead smugglers.

However, having shelled out a few hundred quid to self-publish the life of local rogue Gabriel Tomkins, I badly needed to flog some copies to defray my costs. 

The book signing on a wet afternoon in Tunbridge Wells was not a notable success.  The few bookshops that stock copies hardly report a rush of sales.  Marketing directly through Amazon brings in a trickle of interest, but I soon discovered the best way to unload surplus stock was to ensure people were sufficiently inebriated to not notice they’d shelled out a fiver for something they probably didn’t want in the first place.

So when my friend Paul, who’s a bit of an expert on the 1747 Battle of Goudhurst, suggested we try telling tales of smuggling at pub suppers, I thought why not?

And it’s proved great fun – for us anyway!  About once a month we head off to a hostelry in a village somewhere in rural Kent or Sussex. There we set up our props and prop up the bar while the punters dine. Afterwards we regale them with tales of ‘runs’ up from the coast with barrels of brandy and parcels of tea, and of fights with revenue officers, and of course the Goudhurst ‘battle’ where the local militia defended the town and killed three of the infamous Hawkhurst Gang.

My man Tomkins rode with the gang after he’d been thrown out of the customs service for double-dealing.  And that was after he’d been transported for leading the Mayfield mob.  But ironically it wasn’t smuggling that led him to the gallows in 1750 – it was highway robbery.  Well I suppose a rogue is a rogue whatever his shade.

I think we’ve got another gig in a few weeks actually in Goudhurst to mark the anniversary of the village’s most famous event. So I’d better dust off the costume, prime the flintlock and sharpen the sword... 

Smugglers Tales

Homes for All?

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Published in Kent and Sussex Courier February  2013

"Time for Change, just not around here"

Guy sat next to me at the public meeting.  He’s lived in the village as long as I can recall - 40 years at least – but a recent divorce means he has to sell up. Too old for a new mortgage and, with commercial rents unaffordable, he faces homelessness. So the debate on building six affordable houses was of keen interest.

Nothing is more contentious for Parish Councils like mine than planning. Few people enthusiastically embrace change, fewer still like new building and in this Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty, development is invariably opposed.

But there is a crying need for rural housing.  Moneyed incomers have been displacing locals for decades. The few council houses have been sold, and any social housing is massively oversubscribed.  Few young people can afford to stay.

The audience listens to the Housing Association outline the proposed development. It’s on a green field at the edge of the village, next to existing social housing.  It will cover half of an attractive meadow, but beyond is uninterrupted countryside for miles. Reluctant publically to oppose homes for those in need, opponents concentrate on design, traffic and infrastructure. Supporters outline current overcrowding and the importance of enabling families to remain in their native village.

The council stays neutral since it owns the development land.  But silently I rehearse points I might have made. The ribbon development of ugly bungalows permitted in the middle of the last century. Loss of local agricultural work as farming changed. Tied cottages sold off to incomers. Two village shops and the pub closed in my lifetime.  Some regrettable, some unavoidable, but all down to the march of time.  Had every previous generation stood Canute-like protecting this green and pleasant corner, the homes most of the protesters inhabit would never have been built.

I want to preserve the countryside too.  I love my woods and streams and fields and hedges, but I recognise how lucky I am to have them and don’t feel I should repel all others who want to live here too.

Leaving the meeting, one opponent who’d moved to the village just a few years ago, was overheard saying it wasn’t building they were against, it was the sort of people social housing would attract. “We came here to get away from these people.  If they come here we might have to move out.”  Guy didn’t say anything but I knew exactly what he was thinking.

Glorious Mud

Glorious Mud

As published in K&S Courier 1^st February 2013

Under the headline “Walkers beware: It’s a mire out there”

Will it NEVER dry out!

The countryside round here is like the Great Grimpen Mire after all the recent rain and snow.

A couple of weeks ago you could have water-skied down our hill.

The stream at the end of the garden burst its banks and flooded the field opposite turning it into a vast water meadow.

Only the hardiest dog owners venture out – and they seem to choose their routes more carefully than I did the other day.  “It’s a lovely walk,” I told Mrs B as we tacked the car up the road, “but it may be a bit muddy.”

Fifteen minutes later Myrtle (that’s the dog not Mrs B) was covered from nose to tail in glutinous goo,  while we two were sunk up to our Wellie rims.  Now it’s not easy to extricate your foot from deep mud AND simultaneously retain your boot and your balance. And it’s not easy to keep a straight face when your other half ends up face down and completely coated.

“But it’s my best coat” she wailed, before a malicious smile erupted as she watched me topple forward with a resounding squelch.  

The farmer whose land we were crossing also had difficulty hiding his mirth as he saw us returning a short while later. “Bit on the damp side,” he said laconically, before ushering his cows onto the public footpath to churn up the last little patch of solid ground.

But please don’t think I’m complaining.  We in the High Weald are blessed with wonderful footpaths and stunning scenery along with some curmudgeonly characters like that farmer.

I hope you’ll meet them over the next weeks and months.  But first perhaps it would be polite to make some introductions.  You’ve already encountered Myrtle, an excessively lively two year-old Springer-Collie.  And you’ve had a fleeting acquaintance with Mrs B whose refrain is usually, “She’s YOUR dog, YOU take her out in this storm/hurricane/blizzard/tornado. I’ll wait until the sun is shining and the birds singing.”

And there’s me.  I really am called Kent.  And I really am from Kent.  Which can be a tad confusing.  But my parents erred sometimes on the pretentious side and rather liked county monikers… like Somerset Maugham.  Somerset Barker somehow just wasn’t right.  And since my grandfather had, in 1930, bought a dilapidated cottage on the outskirts of Benenden, the association with this county seemed sufficient to name me after it.  And that’s where our story starts...