- Location
- Bury St Edmunds, Suffolk
One of the downsides of spending a lot of spare time last summer building drystone walls, harvesting my biggest ever pile of round bales, and then sloping off to frolic round the Alps, was that I neglected to tidy up somestorm drains and gutters. And unsurprisingly, this has come back to bite me in the bum, as biblical deluges drench us on a daily basis.
Fed up with water seeping through the floor of the sawmill building, and the bedding soggier than it should be in a nearby building full of cattle, I decided to sort out various problems last week. Silt was dug out and removed from gutters, bucket loads of stone shuttled in with the telehandler to build water-bars that a bit of subsequent traffic won’t disturb, tipping torrents where I’d rather they ran. All kinds of ‘upstream thinking’ wasgoing on. That’s the fashionable phrase, although with no-one upstream to blame, my woes are only down to me.
I’m sure it all sounds very wholesome and sensible, catching up with maintenance through honest toil, resulting in a demonstrably functional storm water system and a self-righteous sense of a job well done. Well, kind of….. the reality however involves a lot of unglamorous and laborious shovel work. Vegetation that’s grown in doesn’t come away cleanly with each shovel full. Oh no, it has to tip the spade sideways, and drag the mound of dirt I’m lifting off , back into the porridge with a squelchy splat. The silt I’m hoofing out is lovely stuff that should eventually go back on the in-bye from whence it came. This means I really don’t want the various rocks, lumps of wood, bits of tangled up bale cord and general detritus to end up on my best mowing ground. And removing the aforesaid foreign objects generally involves bending down and hoiking em out by hand…soggy muddy cold hands. And there is an inevitability to my getting a scratch on the nose, or a glob of gloop backfiring off the shovel, leaving me with mud splattered about my manly rugged face, and moth eaten beard. Funny, you never see the blokes in the magazine adverts looking like I do by the end of my days toil. Oh no, they might be looking sternly at a far horizon, clutching axes that’ve never bitten wood, and probably going by the names of Brad or Kurt, but the beggars are always immaculate.
I should mention here that, while being quizzed about what she was going to buy me for a pressie for yesterday’s festivities, my beloved Alison had been joshing about some kind of beard ‘product’…apparently one should dress ones beard with fine aromatic oils or somesuch. Hmm. I’m not sure my application of whatever I’m digging out of these gutters qualifies. I’ll have to ask herself whether they’re having the desired effect…whatever that might be.
At least, in my efforts, I’ve resisted the temptation to do what the Council do along the roadsides, which is to build neat banks with all the silt….just exactly ready to slump straight back into the gutter the minute you sneeze…or just turn your back. No, I’ve loaded it away, putting it in a gurt heap where I can scoop it up again in the spring. I noticed, clearing the gutter behind the cow barn that was a problem, that I’d removed circa 5 tonnes before I made much difference….and every ounce of it must’ve travelled some distance down a track and across the concreted yard to get where it had fetched up! Fascinating.
Anyway. At least this frenzy of activity will surely make the rain stop, and by Jimminy I could do with a break in the weather. It’s been hard on the stock the last month or so. We’ve had a flurry of autumn calves born out, and while we’re getting them housed now, ….it’s been a rough time for them. One lovely dun heifer calf was doing well for a fortnight, but a particularly bad rainstorm left it a bit hunched the following morning. I couldn’t get back to it that afternoon after I’d fed everyone, and the cow came to feed without it the next day. It’ll be somewhere in 200 acres of gorse now, resting. Another we fetched straight in, having been born in another such storm, but somehow the cow stood on its guts in the shed, and it checked out within 24 hours.Sometimes you can’t win em all, eh?
Anyway, for those we’ve lost, I’ll raise a dram, and another for those we saved. Then I’ll lift a third for a drier New Year. Good luck, and I hope the changing of the year brings you peace.
Fed up with water seeping through the floor of the sawmill building, and the bedding soggier than it should be in a nearby building full of cattle, I decided to sort out various problems last week. Silt was dug out and removed from gutters, bucket loads of stone shuttled in with the telehandler to build water-bars that a bit of subsequent traffic won’t disturb, tipping torrents where I’d rather they ran. All kinds of ‘upstream thinking’ wasgoing on. That’s the fashionable phrase, although with no-one upstream to blame, my woes are only down to me.
I’m sure it all sounds very wholesome and sensible, catching up with maintenance through honest toil, resulting in a demonstrably functional storm water system and a self-righteous sense of a job well done. Well, kind of….. the reality however involves a lot of unglamorous and laborious shovel work. Vegetation that’s grown in doesn’t come away cleanly with each shovel full. Oh no, it has to tip the spade sideways, and drag the mound of dirt I’m lifting off , back into the porridge with a squelchy splat. The silt I’m hoofing out is lovely stuff that should eventually go back on the in-bye from whence it came. This means I really don’t want the various rocks, lumps of wood, bits of tangled up bale cord and general detritus to end up on my best mowing ground. And removing the aforesaid foreign objects generally involves bending down and hoiking em out by hand…soggy muddy cold hands. And there is an inevitability to my getting a scratch on the nose, or a glob of gloop backfiring off the shovel, leaving me with mud splattered about my manly rugged face, and moth eaten beard. Funny, you never see the blokes in the magazine adverts looking like I do by the end of my days toil. Oh no, they might be looking sternly at a far horizon, clutching axes that’ve never bitten wood, and probably going by the names of Brad or Kurt, but the beggars are always immaculate.
I should mention here that, while being quizzed about what she was going to buy me for a pressie for yesterday’s festivities, my beloved Alison had been joshing about some kind of beard ‘product’…apparently one should dress ones beard with fine aromatic oils or somesuch. Hmm. I’m not sure my application of whatever I’m digging out of these gutters qualifies. I’ll have to ask herself whether they’re having the desired effect…whatever that might be.
At least, in my efforts, I’ve resisted the temptation to do what the Council do along the roadsides, which is to build neat banks with all the silt….just exactly ready to slump straight back into the gutter the minute you sneeze…or just turn your back. No, I’ve loaded it away, putting it in a gurt heap where I can scoop it up again in the spring. I noticed, clearing the gutter behind the cow barn that was a problem, that I’d removed circa 5 tonnes before I made much difference….and every ounce of it must’ve travelled some distance down a track and across the concreted yard to get where it had fetched up! Fascinating.
Anyway. At least this frenzy of activity will surely make the rain stop, and by Jimminy I could do with a break in the weather. It’s been hard on the stock the last month or so. We’ve had a flurry of autumn calves born out, and while we’re getting them housed now, ….it’s been a rough time for them. One lovely dun heifer calf was doing well for a fortnight, but a particularly bad rainstorm left it a bit hunched the following morning. I couldn’t get back to it that afternoon after I’d fed everyone, and the cow came to feed without it the next day. It’ll be somewhere in 200 acres of gorse now, resting. Another we fetched straight in, having been born in another such storm, but somehow the cow stood on its guts in the shed, and it checked out within 24 hours.Sometimes you can’t win em all, eh?
Anyway, for those we’ve lost, I’ll raise a dram, and another for those we saved. Then I’ll lift a third for a drier New Year. Good luck, and I hope the changing of the year brings you peace.
