My neighbour is a lifelong beef cattle farmer. Mark Cottle and his family have farmed the land next to me for decades and there isn’t much he doesn’t know about our part of Somerset. When weaving his pale-blue tractor down the lane that runs between his farm and mine, he often stops to hop off and have a chat. This year, with the first stirrings of spring in the air as we stood surveying his fields and mine, Mark cast a distinctly critical eye over my land. ‘It’s all a bit of a mess, isn’t it?’ he suggested with a half-smile, raising an eyebrow.
Compared with his well-maintained farm next door, he’s right. His hedgerows are trimmed, box-like, to perfection annually; his well-fertilised grass mown and rolled in wide stripes, a dazzling shade of green. Mine is unkempt and it’s getting worse. We’ve sold off nearly all of the livestock: the 40 Dorset Poll sheep are gone for good and all but two of the White Park cattle, too, for a time. Our plan is to have them back in a few years’ time, once Nature has run riot.
We’ve ripped out all of our internal fencing, dug out several new ponds and filled in the artificially straightened ditch that ran deep and dark along the valley bottom, creating in its place a rewiggled, shallow stream, free to meander as it likes. Already, small patches of thorny scrub, gorse, blackthorn, dog rose, bramble and hawthorn are springing up through the sward and the wetter corners of what were once neatly enclosed fields are home to woodcock and snipe, which explode from the rushes at the slightest disturbance. All around, Mark sees intolerable species that hamper productivity—sallow, rushes, thorns—whereas I see something different: the beginnings of an exciting period of Nature recovery and, with it, an entirely different way of managing my farm.
Denne historien er fra August 18, 2021-utgaven av Country Life UK.
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Denne historien er fra August 18, 2021-utgaven av Country Life UK.
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Save our family farms
IT Tremains to be seen whether the Government will listen to the more than 20,000 farming people who thronged Whitehall in central London on November 19 to protest against changes to inheritance tax that could destroy countless family farms, but the impact of the good-hearted, sombre crowds was immediate and positive.
A very good dog
THE Spanish Pointer (1766–68) by Stubbs, a landmark painting in that it is the artist’s first depiction of a dog, has only been exhibited once in the 250 years since it was painted.
The great astral sneeze
Aurora Borealis, linked to celestial reindeer, firefoxes and assassinations, is one of Nature's most mesmerising, if fickle displays and has made headlines this year. Harry Pearson finds out why
'What a good boy am I'
We think of them as the stuff of childhood, but nursery rhymes such as Little Jack Horner tell tales of decidedly adult carryings-on, discovers Ian Morton
Forever a chorister
The music-and way of living-of the cabaret performer Kit Hesketh-Harvey was rooted in his upbringing as a cathedral chorister, as his sister, Sarah Sands, discovered after his death
Best of British
In this collection of short (5,000-6,000-word) pen portraits, writes the author, 'I wanted to present a number of \"Great British Commanders\" as individuals; not because I am a devotee of the \"great man, or woman, school of history\", but simply because the task is interesting.' It is, and so are Michael Clarke's choices.
Old habits die hard
Once an antique dealer, always an antique dealer, even well into retirement age, as a crop of interesting sales past and future proves
It takes the biscuit
Biscuit tins, with their whimsical shapes and delightful motifs, spark nostalgic memories of grandmother's sweet tea, but they are a remarkably recent invention. Matthew Dennison pays tribute to the ingenious Victorians who devised them
It's always darkest before the dawn
After witnessing a particularly lacklustre and insipid dawn on a leaden November day, John Lewis-Stempel takes solace in the fleeting appearance of a rare black fox and a kestrel in hot pursuit of a pipistrelle bat
Tarrying in the mulberry shade
On a visit to the Gainsborough Museum in Sudbury, Suffolk, in August, I lost my husband for half an hour and began to get nervous. Fortunately, an attendant had spotted him vanishing under the cloak of the old mulberry tree in the garden.
