- Location
- Bury St Edmunds, Suffolk
I think we’d better have a little talk about what happened in the snow last weekend. Living and working on Dartmoor, we all know that a bit of snow on the moors will out bring droves of ‘townies’ at the first chance. For us, it’s an occupational hazard. The media will delight in starting it off by showing some shivering child building a snowman beside the main road. There’ll soon be the weekend warriors, in their souped up 4x4s, wanting to show how macho they are with knobbly great wide tyres and ‘Paris/Dakar Rally’ stickers in the window. The fact that they’re mostly accountants and kindergarten teachers by day, and that the jeeps are just toys, doesn’t stop them blocking the lanes and generally getting in my way. Happily, they usually slide into a protruding granite boulder soon enough, bashing in their SuperButchMacMudPlugger 500, and have to limp home. Then, once ordinary cars are travelling, there’s motorists crowding the arteries. They too get stuck, astonished that snow and ice are slippery.
Lots of them stop to feed the ponies beside the roads, although curiously they seldom stick around to see what happens when the ponies hang around the roadsides as the sun dips. For then, on foggy winter nights, the same poor creatures get smashed into messy pieces. It’s a shame the idiots who encourage the mares to come to cars don’t then have to scrape up the intestines, or shoot those in agony with flailing broken legs. Hey-ho.
And if there’s been no snow on lower ground, they’ll be desperate to bring the family, and frolic in the novel white stuff. How this affects those of us who live and work here isn’t especially high on anyone’s agenda. Last weekend brought an unholy alignment of events, revealing this indifference at its worst. Firstly, there hasn’t been any snow to speak of previously this winter, and then by the weekend, it was only really manifest above 1100’-1200’. Only a handful of farms locally were still well covered on Saturday morning, and by lunchtime, they were equally covered in crowds of the public, with their sledges, tea trays, squealing kids and yapping dogs, having fun.
As we all know, there is public access across the commons, and most of the newtakes –the enclosed ‘rough’- where everyone is at liberty to play in the snow. Sadly though, the meagre blanket didn’t cover the protruding vegetation, which made for poor sledging. However, the tightly grazed fields of in-bye were neatly whitened. So, despite the fact that they had no business whatsoever in these farmers fields, hordes of people made free. The sheep were forced to hide as far from the roads as they could get. I had to go out in the truck mid-day Saturday to pick up cattle cake, and saw it myself.
Cars were abandoned everywhere in their hundreds, gates left open, fences clambered over, trash left where it was dropped. Care, courtesy and respect for property were absent.
By the greatest good fortune, the farmer who bore the brunt of it happens to lamb late in the spring, as is wise on such tough ground, so his ewes aren’t far on in lamb. When he came to feed them that day, he had to shepherd them to pasture away from the intrusion. He wasn’t a very happy man given that, without doubt, several of his ewes will have lost foetuses due to stress. It must have been a very difficult weekend for him. Had this event taken place later in the winter, when the ewes are heavily in lamb, there would have been dozens or scores of spontaneous abortions…...and you think he’s a killjoy?
I understand that, when asked to take their pleasure where they have a right to frolic, pretty much everybody refuses, many of them in the most abusive of terms. Somehow, they imagine a sprinkling of snow makes such selfish intrusion acceptable. It’s especially bitter that they need the tightly grazed sheep pasture to take their pleasure, but spit in the eye of the man who provides it.
Clearly, the National Park and the Police have to resolve this matter. The Act under which the National Park Authority is formed gives them specific responsibilities regarding public recreation, but their tiny handful of dutiful and diplomatic rangers can’t be expected to deal with this kind of behaviour.
Perhaps those who want to frolic on farmland in such a manner should expect to pay a few quid for the privilege, changing the nature of the relationship. The local media should also play their part.
About the author
Originally published in The Western Morning News, these articles are reproduced for the enjoyment of TFF members World-wide by kind permission of the author Anton Coaker and the WMN
Anton Coaker is a fifth generation farmer keeping suckler cows and flocks of hill sheep high on the Forest of Dartmoor and running a hardwood and mobile sawmill.
A prodigious writer and regular correspondent for The Western Morning News, NFU and The Farming Forum, Anton’s second book “The Complete Bullocks” is available from www.anton-coaker.co.uk
