Verging on the Hazardous

 T of TW Feb 2016

Row over Responsibility for Rutted Lanes

By Kent Barker

I got my ear bent by a local farmer the other day.  “That letter you published in the village magazine – bit unfair.  It’s not our fault.  Anyway we were here first.”

After pointing out that I’m not responsible for what the magazine publishes, I tried to disentangle what had so irked him.  The letter was, I thought, relatively mild and quite well argued.  It expressed concern about farm vehicles damaging verges and drains along the narrow lanes that proliferate round here. “These vehicles are getting larger in some cases they are as wide as the whole lane making passing virtually impossible.  This is having a detrimental effect on the sides of the lanes … causing deep trenches.”

It’s certainly true that, in the extraordinarily wet weather we’ve had this winter, verges have been badly chewed up.  Part of the problem is that there are no official lay-bys or passing places, so if you meet another vehicle you have little option but to pull over onto the side and pray that you won’t get get stuck in the mud.  Otherwise it’s a long reverse, possibly up hill and round a bend or two.

So you can see the point. Harassed home owners, trying to make the station on time for their daily commute, or scurrying late for the school run, do perhaps have a legitimate gripe about large slow-moving tractors and trailers clogging up ‘their’ lanes.

But, as the farmer pointed out, there is another perspective. How did the lanes come to exist in the first place?  Round here in the Weald they generally started as drovers’ routes. Anglo-Saxon settlers imported ‘transhumance’ - the seasonal herding of stock from one area to another. As their stock was mainly pigs, they created swine pastures in woodland clearings – known as ‘dens’ - hence Benenden and Rolvenden etc.  By Norman times surrounding woods had been enclosed by manorial lords or ‘assarted’ – cleared, and the countryside we’d recognise today began to be created. But the tracks remained, linking the dens, some of which turned into settlements while others became outlying farms. And it remained thus for a thousand years.  But then, less than a century ago, the internal combustion engine changed it all.  Suddenly it was practical for people with no links to faming to live in isolated rural homes.  And along with their cars came macadamized road surfaces.

So perhaps our letter writer should accept that the lanes she is so concerned about are only there because of farming. As, in all likelihood, is her house.  And the only reason the rural countryside, which presumably drew her there in the first place, remains as it does is because of farming.  And farming is a business.  Which has always needed to transport goods.  Other business may be able to re-locate to specially designed industrial parks near main roads.  Farmers can’t.  If you have a dairy farm down a narrow lane, you have – at the very minimum - to get cattle feed in and milk out, along that lane.

But surely our correspondent has a point about the size of modern farm vehicles?  Well yes and no.  A modern tractor trailer can be up to almost 25 tonnes.  A trailer behind an old fashioned grey Fergie or Fordson Major was likely to be about 3.5 tonnes.  So to transport 24 tonnes of silage you could have one trip by the modern rig, or seven by the old one.  That’s seven extra journeys, probably at considerably lower speeds, clogging up your lanes. 

Even seven journeys by a lighter vehicle would cause less damage to the road than one much heavier one, wouldn’t they?   Not necessarily.  Modern agricultural vehicles are fitted with those huge balloon tyres which spread the weight over a greater surface.  Farmers use them because they don’t crush or compact the soil in their fields as much as standard tyres.  So it’s possible that they cause less damage to verges than earlier tractors and that the ‘deep trenches’ are not from farm vehicles, but cars - or delivery vans which have dramatically increased in the Amazon/eBay/Ocardo era of home shopping.

Farmers themselves complain of the domestication of the lanes.  One homeowner has a wide verge between his boundary hedge and the road which he kindly mows, even though it doesn’t belong to him.  However, to prevent incursion from vehicles, he’s put in a line of posts along the kerb.  It means it can’t be used as a passing place and even makes it difficult for tractors to turn at the junction there. 

Perhaps the lesson is that all should recognise the lanes have to be shared by residents, and farmers and businesses alike.  And that depredations need to be reported to, and repaired by, the county council.  But getting any action from them is another story!

ends.