The View From the Hill

Confession – new drone, couldn’t find old one lost in forest.

Here we see the Stour valley accommodating the excessive autumn rainfall for a third time already this season, this view just east of Durweston, with Manor France farm left of centre, and Blandford in the distance.  This flood resulted from the combined effect of 95mm of rain in the previous 48 hours, on top of the melting 3 inches of snow that had fallen two days earlier.

This had followed a lovely dry period mid November, a welcome respite from the relentless downfalls of the previous two months.  The drier period had allowed us to return our animals to the meadows, there being plenty of grass still left to eat before winter.  The 91 year old early warning system lit up on the Saturday morning, so Fred and Rosie moved the cattle up onto higher ground behind Knighton House, and Jayne and I rounded up our lambs that have been free ranging the meadows for many weeks.  We then sat and watched with Father as the water rose before our eyes, over the next two hours the land across which we had just walked the lambs became completely submerged.  A bit close for comfort, the animals can’t be trusted not to get themselves marooned on the last bit of dry land, and sheep in particular will not voluntarily put a foot in the water. Sheep floating downstream into Blandford not a good outcome.

A pic from July 2012 shows that if they can be persuaded, cattle will give a good show of actually enjoying it, admittedly the water was a lot warmer on that occasion.

Please note the oak tree with sunshine on it in the middle of the arable field below the water in the top picture, when Storm Darragh blew through a few couple of weeks ago, it caused plenty of trouble. 

We were in Devon at the time, and were disturbed late Saturday night by the noise of roofing sheets being ripped off a cattle shed near the house. The cattle seemed remarkably calm when we checked them, and pulled the broken sheets out of their bedding.
On our return home, we were hugely saddened to find that the old oak tree between Durweston and Bryanston in the Park field, that has been leaning perilously since it lost a massive limb several years ago, had finally succumbed to gravity, and now lies sprawled and desolate.  Its root ball is huge, and the hole left by it surprisingly deep.

At last, an opportunity arose to use our still shiny concrete mixer for the job it was really intended for by the manufacturer.  Regular readers may recall our seed mixing habit, which doesn’t trouble the interior paintwork, whereas the first mix of concrete was likely to have a yellow hue.  The project here is to prevent damp finding its way into our new classroom, the exterior soil level having been higher than the floor inside, we decided to create an open dry drain, which required the creation of a footing and a block retaining wall.  Drew is once again the skilled fellow doing all the clever bits. His cast in-situ kerb is a masterpiece.

Our cluster group was treated to a ‘Beaver special’ a few weeks ago, Neve Bray from Dorset FWAG (farming and wildlife advisory group) took us through the history of beaver persecution followed by extinction in the UK some 400 years ago, and then moved on to explain what beavers can bring to a river catchment.  Beaver fans claim they can slow down the passage of water through a catchment by creating leaky dams and wetland areas, whereas the less convinced fear they will destroy valuable trees and cause unpredictable flooding of settlements and productive land.  Both would be correct, the skilled bit is in deciding where their work could be beneficial, and steer them towards it, as well as to possess the (legal and practical) ability to prevent them doing the wrong thing in the wrong place.  The Dorset Stour enters the sea at Christchurch harbour, after meandering through many miles of built up area.  It has a huge catchment running up to Wincanton and Stourhead in the north, and close to Sherborne in the west. With such a huge catchment it does not need very many hours of heavy rain to build a flood risk.

On a river like the Dorset Stour, where the principle passage of the river was deepened and widened by dredging in the past, and had many mills and weirs built, the main body is so far removed from a naturally functioning river habitat, that no amount of beaver work is likely be of much use, whereas some of its tributaries, which still retain their naturally formed dimensions, might be usefully modified by beaver work to slow down the movement of water during extreme rainfall events, by holding it up and only slowly releasing it into the river over a period of time which would lessen the risk of flooding further downstream.  This is immediately a worry for farmers of the land alongside the tributaries, they fear their land will spend more time under water, damaging pasture or crops, or permanently reducing the productivity of the soil.  However it should not be too difficult for government to devise a scheme that would reward land owners for allowing this, likely to be considerably cheaper than building massive flood barriers in the built up areas.

But how do you prevent the beavers working where they are not wanted?  They must be able to be controlled if they wander off and threaten areas where they may do significant damage.  Legislation that accompanied their re-introduction, surprisingly rapidly, made them a protected species, so they cannot be touched and their dams cannot be removed without official approval.

Beavers can be legally introduced to an area deemed improvable, under licence.  What is making life complicated in some areas is where beavers are being introduced without licence, or surprise surprise, they migrate to areas beyond their original release, and this very quickly causes conflict between the bealievers who enabled the release, and those who see them simply as vermin.  Not helpful, and very unlikely to help with flood control or wetland development (which in the right areas is good for birds and other species), it will cause conflict, and prolong the pain suffered by people who endure the consequences of flooding, with little hope for improvement.

Sitting in on a meeting of the Stour Delivery group a few weeks ago, we were given a detailed and polished presentation on the issues of flooding in the lower Stour, from Wimborne and onwards towards Christchurch.  A great deal of effort has been expended by the Environment agency in creating a detailed report on flood risk, focussing on a strategy for reducing risk of flooding to households and other property.  The strategy looks at first glance well-meaning, see below:

But frankly it’s a load of bureaucratic waffle and fails to address the real problem. It is worth noting that the most vulnerable areas are those populated by Park homes (mobile homes), which have been shoehorned into areas deemed unsuitable for building due to flood risk.  Should we be surprised that there is still a problem, these sites still flood!  The water doesn’t care whether it is concrete and brick, or mobile homes.

The reason for reporting on this is to point out that nowhere in the report is serious attention given to attending to the quantity of water entering the lower section of the river from higher up in the catchment, following periods of heavy rain.  When the question asked was “Where does most of the flooding risk come from; the excessive amount of built up area in the floodplain, or water arriving from higher in the catchment?” the answer was clear, it was the latter.  Yet the report continues to discuss at great length how to reduce flood risk with construction of earth banks, concrete walls etc, and perhaps moving some of the Park homes, and doesn’t begin to address the issue in a whole catchment sense at all. 

The sense of frustration was acute, the sound of balls being kicked down the road was deafening.  Some of the answers are there for the taking, but no-one seems to want to try.

Our oldest cow, Freda, also known as 2244, her tag number, is 16 years old, a fine age for a cow, she has borne us 14 calves in that time, worth many 000’s in sales and food put on the table.  She is the last of our original calves bought from our cousin Will when Dougal started up the suckler beef herd. We have several of her daughters in the herd today, and this year’s calf being a heifer and a pretty colour will also be kept for breeding, continuing the line.

If you are eating breakfast you might want to take a break for a few moments before proceeding…..

A couple of weeks ago our local friendly vet came to examine our cows to see how many are in calf, and to give us a rough idea in what order they will produce. Sheep are quite easy to scan for the presence of lambs, through a handy wool-free zone just in front of the udder, they can be examined with a hand held scanner connected to a screen, on a raised platform in a race.  An experienced scanner can tell you how many lambs are present within 10-15 seconds.  With cows it is an altogether different task, involving a long glove, a considerable amount of effort, a great deal of manure, and a small hand held scanner connected to a tiny screen embedded in a pair of special glasses.  The approximate date of birth can be obtained by matching the size of the embryo to a scale on the screen. These pictures are from the archive, before the days of the electronic headset. Andrew has now given up this joyous pastime. The very sad news is that Freda is not in calf.

The cattle are grazing cover crop, here shown on the Knoll, they are always ready to move when someone comes to let them into the new strip next day, and immediately put their heads down and start on the fresh foliage in front of them.

Here are our sheep grazing on a newly established herbal ley (grass and herbs), this was undersown last spring, into a crop of spring barley, the barley was cleared at harvest, and bingo, there is the ley growing amongst the stubble. The cows grazed it briefly back in October, and now the sheep are nibbling it down to remove annual weeds and encourage thickening up. This should mean it will be ready for the cows to return earlier in the spring than if we had sown it after harvest, in August.
The more observant reader will by now have noticed clues pointing to the occurrence of fertile behaviour in this field. The yellow raddle mark on the rear of the ewe on the right tells us that young Ronnie, our new ram, has been at work. Ronnie can be seen in the left hand picture, standing next to our rather tall wether, Little Bear. Laughter erupted amongst the farm team when they first spotted Ronnie, jokes about step ladders and telephone directories proliferated, and father was even heard to ask why one of the ewes had been left behind with its lamb in the farm paddock, when the rest had been moved to better grass. Ronnie was being rested with Little Bear for a few days before being put to work. Well the doubters can rest assured that Ronnie, in spite of his Corbett-like stature, has performed as well as we could have hoped. All the ewes have been covered, and none have returned for a second service in the 12 days since the first complete 17 day cycle. Lambing with luck will begin around the 1st of May.

Some readers might have been expecting a few words on the very current issues around the government’s recent budget proposals regarding changes to inheritance tax, and agricultural and business property reliefs in particular. Please follow this link to a separate page on this issue, if it is up your particular street.

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