Sheep-dog Trials?

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Courier Countryside Column  Friday 19^th April 2013 under headline:

Training your dog will pay ewe back...

Luckily Myrtle is good with sheep as there are usually a couple of hundred in the Orchard.

The other week I was having a coffee in the Land Rover while she lay on the ground hoping I’d toss her a doggie treat. A curious ewe approached.  Usually they get to within a few meters, decide discretion is the better part of valour where canines are concerned, and back off.

Not this one.  She just kept on coming. Myrtle looked up; they eyeballed each other; the woolly one continued cautiously until their noses were touching.  I’ve seen dogs rub noses.  I may even have seen sheep rub noses. I’d never before seen a dog allowing a sheep to do it.

Those weeks of early training Myrtle seem to have paid off.   And it can be pretty important as you’ll see.

It’s 8.30 on a Sunday morning and I’m just sitting down to breakfast and wondering when the paper will arrive when the phone rings.  It’s one of our neighbours at the orchard, clearly in distress.  Her dog has just come back covered in blood. Apparently it jumped a fence and savaged a sheep.  It was a rescue German Shepherd.  Where is it now?  The sheep’s dying in a ditch; the dog securely back inside the house. Do I have a phone number for the sheep farmer? 

His landline is on answerphone and he doesn’t like anything as intrusive as a mobile so I leave a message and get back to breakfast and the Observer which has, finally, arrived. 

Later I’m up at the orchard putting in an hour’s pruning when I bump into the farmer.  I’m surprised he’s so calm.  No, it could have been much worse, he tells me.  The rest of the flock didn’t seem at all agitated so the dog almost certainly hadn’t chased them, but had just gone straight for the throat of that one ewe and then returned home.  And that’s good?  You’re right it is.  A dog chasing an entire flock of pregnant ewes can cause multiple miscarriages which would be a real disaster.  As it is the owner of the dog has offered to pay.  She will be in for rather more than £100 for the pregnant ewe, £40 for disposal of the corpse, plus the farmer’s time and petrol.

Probably better than having your dog shot though.

AGE BEFORE BEAUTY

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Courier Countryside Column  Friday April 12 2013 

Courier headline (why  do they insist  on italicising one word?):

1970 class leaves the rest  standing

Did I mention it poured throughout the afternoon when we were laying hedges in the Community Orchard?  Probably not – rain’s hardly news now.  But it meant the vehicles bringing the Hedgers and their equipment across the fields in the morning had somehow to get out at the end of the day.

The Discovery was the first to get stuck in the mud before it had even slithered through the first gate. Then their Mitsubishi Shogun with its trailer got bogged down.  Only my ancient 1970 Land Rover seemed able to cope with the conditions. It struggled a bit when we attached the trailer but got to the road eventually.  The Disco stayed up to its hubs in slime and, even without its trailer, the Shogun was clearly going nowhere.  Eventually the Orchard’s even more venerable Ford tractor was pressed into service and towed the modern cars out.

I don’t want this this to become a paean to petrol heads, but it’s worth observing just how much better off-road a 43 year old Land Rover was than a brand new one - or even a Japanese 4x4 come to that.

My long-wheelbase Series IIa, named Fergie, is a thoroughly disreputable vehicle.  He’s battered and bruised, His blue paint has quite worn through in places. He’s habitually covered in mud.  His seats are torn, his interior a disgrace and some years ago I converted him to a pick-up by taking off the Safari top and fabricating a canvas tilt over the driver’s cab.  Mrs B refuses to travel in him and even Myrtle shows some reluctance. But this eccentric vehicle is just perfect for orchard work.  Tools are kept in a tin trunk bolted to the back. The rest of the rear is filled with logs and stakes and tree ties and sheep protection. In the twenty years I’ve had him he’s broken down just once … when he overheated on the Cranbrook by-pass after I’d massively overloaded him with loft flooring.

He’s the living embodiment of the claim that 75% of all ‘series’ Land Rovers are still on the road today, and makes a mockery of the current advertising campaign suggesting the ugly Range Rover Coupe evolved from a 1947 Series I!

I’m sure I heard Fergie gently guffaw when we sailed past that modern Discovery stuck fast in the mud!

‘Hedge layers do it horizontally’

Courier Countryside Column 5 April 2013.

Modern way to create hedge from the ages

The first glimmers of spring?  Daffodils are out, Primroses appearing, Snowdrops have been and gone. And fields echo to the sound of chainsaws. 

It’s a country convention that you don’t cut hedges between March and August to avoid disturbing nesting birds. (Indeed it’s an offence under the 1981 Wildlife and Countryside Act). So hedgers are busy trying to beat the deadline.

We hosted a traditional hedge laying demonstration at the Community Orchard a week or so back. Two men from the South of England Hedge Laying Society arrived with staves and binders and billhooks and … chainsaws.

I was rather disappointed.  I thought that this ancient craft would eschew anything so modern as a chainsaw.  But once I saw (no pun intended) how much time and effort they saved I was converted.

The first task is to clear all old dead wood and brambles in the hedge. Then with careful use of your billhook you slice three quarters of the way through a stem as close to the ground as possible and bend it over horizontally.  This is the art.  Cutting just the right depth. Too much and you sever it completely. Too little and it won’t bend, but snaps in half.

The trouble is that stems of old hedgerows come in all thicknesses.  Anything up to a couple of inches diameter you can do easily with a bill hook, but for anything much over that, out comes the chainsaw.

Anyhow a few hours later and you’ve got a succession of semi-severed stems leaning almost horizontally facing the same direction.  Then you drive posts in between them at 18 inch intervals and weave binders along the top.  A few bits of tidying up and you’ve got a beautifully laid hedge which is pretty much sheep-proof.  I say pretty much because there were a few holes through which I thought an ambitious lamb might just make a bid for freedom.  So I tentatively asked if they would be insulted if I put back the old wire fence.  No, they’d be insulted if I didn’t.  The new buds and shoots need to be protected from the sheep while they grow.

It’s a pretty labour intensive job, achieving just 40 yards in a day.  But extremely satisfying.  And it does look beautiful.  Apologies though to anyone disturbed by the angry buzz of our chainsaws first thing on a Sunday morning.

Democracy in Action.

Courier Countryside Column 29^th March 2013

Democracy in Action: Parish battles for affordable homes

I’ve mentioned before the difficulty for villages like ours to find suitable locations for affordable housing.  People are naturally concerned about development on greenfield sites and there’s a general presumption against building in an Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty, a designation that covers almost our entire area.

So when a local institution recently applied for planning permission to consolidate buildings on their sprawling site, and to build twenty-four new houses to finance the work, our Parish Council took a keen interest.  This, we thought, could be a win win situation since there’s an obligation on developers to provide a percentage of affordable housing on new builds of more than 10 units.

Then we found the planning officers at Tunbridge Wells had determined the site was too far from the village centre and so was deemed ‘unsustainable’ for affordable units. Worse still they identified no local need for social housing, and said the developers could by-pass their responsibility by handing a sum of money to the Borough Council.  This could be used by our village if we could find suitable sites, or ‘cascaded’ out to nearby towns if we could not.

It was extremely disappointing. The development was likely to be the largest in our village for a generation and a golden opportunity for us to get the affordable housing that we knew was desperately needed.  And it was on brownfield land!

I was delegated to speak at the Borough planning meeting in Tunbridge Wells. The committee members – elected councillors – took a keen interest and questioned our case closely.  But the officers – civil servants –maintained outright opposition.  All seemed lost when a motion to pass the application unamended was proposed and seconded.

Then one Councillor said how concerned she was about the lack of on-site affordable units and proposed a deferment.  This generated some support. A showdown seemed imminent.  Suddenly the developers were whispering to the chief planning officer; an adjournment was granted; urgent phone calls were made, and huddled meetings conducted in the corridor.

Thirty minutes later the developers returned to the committee saying they would alter their application to include eight affordable units on-site. I could hardly believe we had done it. The borough councillors seemed equally delighted. And we all congratulated the developers for their flexibility.

As I left the Town Hall I reflected that this really had been and example of local government working for local people.