September has come upon us,
fooling us with a glorious first week of warm sunshine and clear air reminding
us that it was still summer. And then
week two blew in, wet and windy and grey and miserable and out went the shorts
in exchange for waterproofs and wellies!
Branches snapped around us as the sudden blast of rain and wind grabbed
tenaciously at their full leaved canopy and brought the weaker limbs to
breaking point. However today we have
got a well-earned reprieve, the sun rose to a cloudless blue sky and a warm
breeze and once again you could get a sense that we weren’t quite in the darker
days yet. If you ever stand on
Stockbridge Down on a warm clear day, that has arrived after a run of windy wet
ones, you will always see the Buzzards and Red Kites showing off their
acrobatic skills with each other and floating lazily on the thermals as they
enjoy the chance to just laze on the warm uprisings of air once more, without
fighting against the elements.
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| Summer's end at Mottisfont...crops harvested, hay and straw cut, the fields returning to their brown winter hue. |
We are just finishing off our
summer works across our sites and planning into the winter and beyond. As ever, our winter work schedule is jam
packed with different projects across all our habitat types, from heathland to
forestry to downland to mire and we are busily scheduling in our volunteer
groups to help assist with it all.
Our sheep flock on Stockbridge
have grown ever rounder as they graze down their new patch of slope. They have reacquainted themselves with all
their old trails and paths through the scrub and yew woodland, where they used
to roam last year before I moved them.
Now I can stand at the corral, give a few bellows and far, far off in
the distance I will see them emerge, like a white, woolly tide, flowing in a
stream from under their favourite patch of Beech and Yew woodland and then
gaining momentum like a breaking wave as they thunder along the slope to the
corral and the sacred Nut Bucket. They
recently underwent a Freedom Foods inspection, as they do every year, and they
showed themselves off to their finest, all coming when I called and looking so
fit and healthy that the inspector actually exclaimed ‘Oh! Don’t they look good!?.’
This was one of the few shining moments with this flock when I can be
slightly smug, instead of the usual moments of being trampled, kicked, head-butted,
and run ragged trying to catch stubborn ones, so I basked in the praise of the
inspector, as did the girls and Walter who stood by my side throughout it all having
his nose scratched, the very image of a faithful and loyal companion (if only
the inspector knew!).
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| The Kingdom of the Sheep; the flock nibbling their way along the slope. |
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| Grazing of grassland helps ensure a short, herb rich sward which benefits species such as this Adonis Blue butterfly, which i found freshly emerged on Stockbridge a few weeks ago. Electric blue! |
One job that is an ongoing task
all year round is the maintenance of areas like boardwalks. Our site along the river Hamble, Curbridge
Nature Reserve, is a long sinuous stretch of Ancient woodland alongside the
tidal estuary. Throughout this woodland
runs stretches of boardwalk that was installed 9 years ago. As is natural after time and the elements
have taken their toll, every now and then the odd plank rots and snaps out and
needs replacing. Having made a note of
how many planks were required this time round I rummaged around in our wood
yard cutting bits to size until I had what was needed. The next challenge was finding a way to get
them all onsite – due to the nature of the site you can park a truck at either
end of the 1.5km stretch of woodland but from there onwards you must walk in as
it is not accessible by vehicle.
Naturally all the boardwalk pieces were scattered through the middle
areas of the site so I figured I would have to carry everything in in bits…and
then came my Bright Idea. We have
several large Ikea rucksack style bags that are meant to be for sorting
recycling products that you can then put on your back and take to a recycling
place. They stand about 4 feet high and
we bought some to use as forestry bags in felling season so we could have our
sledgehammer, wedges, tool kit etc. all in a bag that we could move from tree
to tree instead of running back and forth carrying stuff or lobbing it. I figured I could use one of these bags, fill
it with wooden planks and all the tools I needed and walk it all in to the site
to where I needed it.
So off I went, got to the site,
parked up and wedged nine 3ftx6inchx2inch planks into the bag, added hammers,
drills, nails, tape measure etc. and was set to go….until I tried to lift
it. After a brief struggle I heaved the
bag onto the back of the truck, turned around and put it on my back and then
stood up straight…and promptly toppled to one side. With a bit of readjustment I got the thing
straight on my back and then wobbled off into the woodland, staggering slightly
left and right. I am not very good at
doing things in small pieces. I would
rather heft everything in all at once under great strain, instead of doing lots
of little journeys – an attitude which I fear will one day leave me either
superhumanly strong or crippled. I won’t
go into huge detail but needless to say, walking around the woods for 3 hours,
staggering up and down the hills with that almighty weight on my back, felt
like some kind of boot camp torture – and I was the only person initiating
it. Each time I got to a plank that
needed repair, I threw the bag down in relief, knowing that I would be making
it lighter by getting rid of some of the contents into the boardwalk. Inevitably, after hiking the length of the
woodland on the bottom path and then back again on the top path (with many
stops of various benches to try and recover) I was not in the best of
tempers. I sat on an open stretch of
boardwalk to eat my lunch, ignore the bruises on my back and try and regain the
feeling in my shoulders.
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| Mirror image on the Hamble |
As I crossly
chewed on my sandwich, cursing the site for its inaccessibility, I glared angrily out
at the water that rippled gently before me. Little Egrets sat perched in the fallen
skeletons of trees that lay sideways in the river, where they had fallen long
ago and a heron stalked the shallows looking for prey. Somewhere in the reed beds Bitterns lurked,
having already been seen and heard booming in the last few weeks and overhead
Ospreys sometimes flew on their long migrations. As I gazed out at that exquisite view I
started to feel myself oh so slowly relaxing, the simmering anger began to dissipate
into the estuary, to be carried away out to sea, and I began to fall back under
the spell which this site always puts me under;
A complete sense of timelessness and detachment.
You could be anywhere and anywhen, completely
alone and yet not lonely, the modern world ceasing to exist with just an
eternal, spiritual changelessness that captures you and soothes the weariest of
minds and most aching of hearts. As you
look out at the diamond like glitter of the sun on the tide, with a vast blue
sky above it, nothing in the view hints at the modern day. It is easy enough to go back through the
ages, the Romans, the Saxons and all who have come before to this site and
stood in this spot and looked at this view and imagine yourself as one of them
and when you finally come out of your reverie, you feel refreshed and reborn
and you have fallen in love with the site all over again.
Such is the beauty, the magic,
the purity of Hamble.
