Kent Life Smuggling Piece

No Nookie for Foxes

ex-Courier Countryside Column 22 March 2013 under cryptic headline:

"If we're talking tennis, love means nothing for foxes"

It was warm enough to appear in shorts the other Monday.  A few hardy souls had risked removing jog pants earlier, but I like to wait until the sun actually heats the court.  We’re talking tennis.  Our Monday morning sessions, locally regarded as being for the retired, self-employed or lay-abouts (the latter probably being my category) usually manage to attract eight vaguely willing participants.

I must say I enjoy playing more now I’m off the club committee.  I served seven years, got our website up and running and instigated on-line booking.  But I failed to get us floodlights.

We have a fantastic junior section and great coach.  But on winter evenings they can’t use their own courts and have to decamp to floodlit ones at an institution a couple of miles away, without toilets, clubhouse or child protection facilities.

I just didn’t anticipate the furore our planning application would cause.  The courts are pretty rural with views out over the Weald.  But round here light ‘pollution’ is a major issue.  We have no streetlights.  Villagers argue they would stop us seeing stars and no considerations of  public safety are countenanced.

Thus even low-level court lights with minimal ‘spill’ were opposed and voluminous letters of objection sent to the planners.  Perhaps the most extraordinary argument was that lights would prevent foxes mating!  Quite why the Renards couldn’t wait until after 9.00pm – or even move a few meters away out of the lights’ ambit - I couldn’t fathom.

Especially as foxes round here are regarded as a major pest – certainly by anyone keeping hens – and the ban on foxhunting is vigorously opposed.

Personally I’m not necessarily against killing foxes if deemed necessary,  though I am uncomfortable about people taking overt pleasure in the process.

Anyway our application was rejected. Probably more because we’re in an area of outstanding natural beauty than because we would be denying Foxes nookie.  But when I leave the clubhouse at night and trigger half a dozen neighbours’ ‘security’ lights I do wonder if perhaps people are a tad myopic when it comes to change.

Spring had clearly not arrived and the following Monday’s game was played in a blizzard. I thought about proposing a roof, possibly retractable, but I’m not sure the locals would go for it.  Even if it did shield the lights!

"Four Legs good..."

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Courier Countryside Column Friday 15^th March

And speaking of pigs … Myrtle and I were walking on the South Downs the other day when we were confronted by pig arks as far as the eye could see, and around 3000 porkers roaming the hills.

Some friends were leaving Tunbridge Wells and building a new house on the edge of the pretty village of Steyning.  Then the pigs arrived on the hill behind them. We were invited over to judge their impact on the new National Park.

My first instinct was to side with the farmer. Livestock is really struggling, hit by huge hikes in feed prices and declining EU subsidies.

It’s particularly tough for pig production which costs around 170p per kilo. That’s higher than the market price, meaning a loss of around £14 per pig sold.

From the window of our friends' new living room it didn’t look TOO bad. Obviously one might prefer NOT to see dozens of curved corrugated-iron stys stretching up the hill, but were tales of slurry running down the slope and threatening local houses possibly exaggerated?

However as we climbed the South Downs Way I began to see their point.  I know they can’t help it, but pigs do smell.  And 3000 pigs smell a lot. While it was lovely to see piglets running wild, and free-range piggeries are surely to be welcomed, they were churning up the hillside.  In fact tractor tyres and pig trotters seemed to have all but destroyed the traditional grass sward.

Horses particularly dislike pigs and one rider on the long distance path is reported to have been thrown while others complain it’s become a no-go area.

Above all objectors argue that pig farming on this scale makes nonsense of the National Park’s objectives - to conserve and enhance its natural beauty, wildlife and cultural heritage.  But the Park says there are no planning issues involved and they have to balance their duty to the public and to those who legitimately farm the area.

It’s the sort of dilemma that occurs regularly between country residents and people who work the land. Over the years round me in Kent, farmers have taken out hedgerows, encroached on woodland and clogged lanes with ever bigger vehicles.  But they provide the food on my plate which I prefer to be as locally sourced as possible – so the conflict of interests is unlikely to be resolved.

... a Piggywig stood

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“There in a wood ...”

A new piggery has appeared in the grounds of a school on one of our regular walks along the valley.  Myrtle seems uninterested in either the grunting or the smell.  But I rather like the porcine scene especially now I understand their impact on the cultural landscape of the area.

At a fascinating recent talk Matt, from the High Weald AONB, demonstrated how the landscape we see today results as much from mankind as from geology. 

And what gave rise to my village and many others around here was, apparently, pigs!

It seems that Anglo-Saxon settlers imported the practice of  ‘transhumance’ which, I learned, is the seasonal herding of stock from one area to another. And since their stock was mainly pigs, they created swine pastures in woodland clearings – known as ‘dens’.  Hence Benenden and Rolvenden and all the others.

So now, as Myrtle and I ramble through our remaining parcels of ancient woodland, I imagine up ahead an immigrant Jute girl from fifteen hundred or so years ago.  She’s herding her swine through the trees along the path which, a little later, is to become the B2086. And she stops overnight in the clearing which will, before long, form our village green.  But her way of life is threatened.  The dens are being settled.  The surrounding woods will soon be enclosed by the lord of the manor or ‘assarted’ (cleared) as the countryside we recognise today begins to be created.  By the time of the Doomsday survey the process is almost over and the medieval field pattern firmly established.

Then it’s sheep that come to graze the fields and bring wealth. Just look at the magnificent parish church in Cranbrook to see how much wealth! But so concerned are the authorities about foreign competition to the local cloth trade (itself established by immigrant Flemish weavers), that the export of wool is banned or heavily restricted.  And that gives rise to the practice of Owling – the illegal export or smuggling of wool from beaches around Camber and Rye.  And then it occurs to someone to use the same boat that’s taking the wool to France, to bring back tobacco or brandy or tea and sell it ‘un-taxed’ in Britain. But that’s another tale.

So the next time you gaze upon a humble pig, just think of the contribution its ancestors have made to our history and landscape …

First Published in Courier Countryside Column Friday 8^th March under headline:  “How the pigs shaped our rural landscape…”

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