The first Wood Anemones are out, so is the Toothwort. Blackbirds and Thrushes are establishing territories and I am sure I have heard the first chiffchaff. Spring is here! It is still winter though for the Woodcock that have been wintering in the woods, they can still be flushed from the damper parts.
As any visitor can see, particularly from the awful mud, we have been extremely busy this winter with about six acres of woods coppiced and fenced using the system we have now decided to use. The wire sections will be re-used every three years as far as possible, and the natural fences turned into habitat piles to aid recovery of the insect life that has been lost. Some standard trees have been removed to let in more light and more of them will be cut down or ring-barked and left for deadwood. All the hole-nesting birds find there is a shortage of available nesting places in the healthy trees, so that the numbers breeding are quite low and some species are absent. Hopefully the birds will eventually stop using the dormouse boxes!
Where the standards have shaded the coupes too much the hazel has died or is in a poor state. This year for the first time we have started to layer the whippy shoots to encourage a greater density of stools in the cleared areas. This involves pegging the long shoots into the ground in a ‘U’shape to stimulate root growth. This only works if you remove the large trees and each year we will continue to do this as we clear the hazel. The work was started by groups of children from the Ancient Technology Centre at Cranborne, under the supervision of Jake Keen and "Uncle" Reg Miles.
At least a hundred trees will have to be thinned to restore the wood to its original state. In the conservation review of ancient woodlands in 1989, comment on photographs show that the wood "should be properly called high forest" and not "coppice with standards" due to the shading, and we have had another ten years growth since then. As each coupe is coppiced the standards will be thinned to a suitable density of about 30 per hectare.
In spring we should have a superb display of Bluebells, Ramsons and some Orchids, together with the first of the migrants, usually Chiffchaffs, Willow Warblers and TurtleDoves.
The Summer Open Day is notable for flowers and birds but especially for butterflies.
Most readers will not know that our Parish is one of the seventy or so which lie within one of the thirty-seven Areas of Outstanding Natural Beauty up and down England. These are much less well known, but in landscape terms no less important than the seven National Parks which are administered differently, and have the added and onerous responsibility of catering for recreation.
Our own AONB, established as long ago as 1983, is called Cranborne Chase and West Wiltshire Downs. We who live in it know that it is a thoroughly rural area. It actually has no towns at all, the boundary running along the outside edges of Salisbury, and then (clockwise) past, not through, Fordingbridge, Wimborne, Blandford, Shaftesbury, Warminster and Wilton.
It contains two expanses of high chalk downland, separated by the Vale of Wardour in the southern half and the Wylye Valley in the northern. What we all need to realise is that it is fairly and squarely up to us, its residents, to retain its distinctiveness.
AONB designation is a national process aimed at conserving and enhancing "natural beauty", a term which includes geological, historical, scientific and wildlife features as well as the visual qualities and physical characteristics. Responsibility for all this rests with the local authorities, so in our own case it is Dorset and Wiltshire (plus for a very few parishes Hampshire and Somerset) County Councils and the relevant District Councils which share with us who live here the task of caring for this AONB.
In order to raise local awareness, there has been every autumn since 1995 a consultative seminar, held in the Area near the county border. These have been interesting and worthwhile occasions attracting by invitation about 75 people each time, and reasonably representative of the farmers and landowners concerned, and of a good number of voluntary and statutory organisations involved in the Area. Issues such as farm development and diversification, the needs of communities, and landscape management have been discussed. Concerted action is not easy, since seven District Councils are inside the Area, and many different groupings of other bodies. But some modest suggestions are emerging. These include the placing of boundary signs. Another is that we should tactfully encourage farmers and landowners to cut their hedges only every two years, and then to do them to an A-shape, which is far more bird and small mammal-friendly than the low flat top. But other ideas will be most gratefully received. Do please write with them to your County Authority:- Richard Burden, Environmental Services Directorate, Dorset County Council, County Hall, Dorchester, Dorset DT1 1XJ
The challenge to every one of us is to manage change creatively, so that by our joint efforts we keep this Area Beautiful. It will be increasingly difficult, given the conflicting pressures of the next few years. Awareness is the first step: we are part of an AONB. The next is grasping the complementary roles of the local authorities, the voluntary organisations and ourselves the residents, and giving time and trouble to act upon them in a shared responsibility.
The beginning of what people call "the third millennium" since the birth of Christ is now only 20 months away and I thought it would be interesting to discover how we will arrive at this date in time. To do this I referred to the "Calendars" section of the Guinness Book of Knowledge.
The most widespread calendar in use is apparently the Gregorian, which is based on the Julian calendar. The Julian calendar was established by Julius Caesar in 46 BC to reform the Roman calendar which had become out of synchronisation with the solar year. On the advice of the Egyptian astronomer Sosigenes, the year 46 BC was lengthened to 445 days to realign it with the solar year.
From then on a period of three years, each lasting 365 days, was to be followed by a leap year with 366 days. Each year was divided into 12 months, each of 30 or 31 days, except February which was at the end of the Roman year and thus given the remaining 28 days in a normal year or 29 days in a leap year.
The year the Julian calendar was introduced became known as "the year of confusion" because so few people understood the change!
The Julian system assumed, however, that the average length of a year was 365.25 days, but this is actually slightly too long (by 11 minutes 14 seconds) when compared with the astronomical year. Over time this discrepancy became even more obvious, and by the year 1582 the calendar was 10 days ahead of the astronomical year. In that year, Pope Gregory XIII solved the problem by turning the 5th of October into the 15th of October. This new system was known as the Gregorian calendar, and most Roman Catholic countries adopted it immediately. Several Protestant nations did not instigate the change until 1700. Britain aligned itself in 1752 whilst Russia stuck to the Julian system until 1918.
To ensure that the slight error in the Julian calendar would not be repeated, it was decided that century years would be leap years only if they were divisible by 400. Thus 1600 was a leap year, and 2000 will be a leap year, but 1700, 1800 and 1900 were not. The Gregorian system has an error of 0.0005 days per year, but it will not need to be adjusted for many hundreds of years; there will probably be no adjustment until the year 4000, which may lose its leap year status, although minute variations in the Sun-Earth relationship have not made this a certainty.
This section of the Book of Knowledge also contained the following derivations of the names of months from their equivalents in the Roman republican calendar :-
January - named after Janus, the god of doorways and of beginnings.
February - named after Februa, the Roman festival of purification.
March - named after the god Mars, the Roman god of war. This was the first month in the Roman calendar.
April - possibly named after the Aphrodite, the Greek equivalent to the Roman goddess Venus. It may however have been named after the latin word aperire, "to open".
May - named after the the goddess Maia, the mother of Mercury.
June - named after the goddess Juno, the wife of Jupiter.
July - named after Julius Caesar in 44 BC.
August - named after the emperor Augustus in 8 BC.
September - the seventh month in the Roman calendar and derived from the latin word septem meaning "seven".
October - derived from the latin word octo meaning "eight".
November - derived from the latin word novem meaning "nine".
December - derived from the latin word decem meaning "ten".
I found a little booklet written by John C. Chadwick on Folklore and Witchcraft in Dorset and Wiltshire containing a piece entitled "The Odstock Curse" which goes as follows:-
The story begins in 1801, when a gypsy by the name of Joshua Scamp was hanged in Salisbury. He came from the village of Odstock and had been found guilty of stealing a horse after his coat was found in the stable where the horse had disappeared. His son-in-law, the real thief, had in fact purposely left the coat there. Joshua knew this, but in order to protect his daughter, who was expecting a baby, he refused to plead and only after his death came the acknowledgement of his innocence. He was buried in Odstock churchyard and gypsies began to visit his grave, but such was the noise and clamour of their gatherings that the rector decided to stop further visits by employing special constables. When the gypsies next returned and their queen was locked out of the church, they smashed everything they could find by way of reprisal. That evening, after visiting the local inn, the queen came back to the churchyard and, standing on the wall, delivered her famous curse.
She told the rector he would no longer be preaching at Odstock by the same time the following year. She predicted two years bad luck for the churchwarden and vowed that the sexton would be buried the following year. She told the special constables that they would "die together, sudden and quick", and finally she cursed the church door, saying that anyone who locked it would die within a year.
Needless to say everything the gypsy queen predicted came true. The rector had a stroke and never preached again; the churchwarden's cows went sick, his crops failed and his wife produced still-born babies; the sexton died of a heart attack and the two special constables disappeared, never to be seen again - two skeletons were found in a shallow grave near Odstock many years later. The church door was locked twice after the curse and both of those who locked it died within a year; the key was eventually thrown into the river by another rector.
The booklet also contained the following long-range weather forecast
Sun Easter Day - Little grass, but good hay; Rain Easter Day - Good deal of grass but bad hay.
Sixpenny Handley? Where's that? What an unusual name!
When I give my address, it's always the same. It’s a fine Dorset village,
Full of true Dorset men Zentile? Bicheno? Cordina? and then....
We've a Smith who's into property, A butcher who’s a Clarke
And our Bobby is called Yogi, who's patrolling after dark.
There’s a Perrett and a Perrott Not a Parrott to be seen,
We have no need for Carrotts, as we have many Greens.
You can find Greens on The Common And in the Hollow too,
There's a Heath in the High Street; yes all of this is true!
There's a Wood in our vicarage Our Bishop's in the Close
Two Birch's share the Five Elms, it gets rediculose! ( sorry!)
Should anyone Rob Jesse We'd catch, arrest and search'em
Then after they'd been sentenced, we'd have someone to Bircham!
If all of this sounds "fishy" Ignore it if you like,
That reminds me…………
We've a Guppy in the Garage and our Salmons on his bike! (Ride on David!)
Parishioners may be interested to hear that the Secretary of State for the Department for Culture, Media & Sport has decided to list Rose Cottage – 67, High Street Grade II, late 18th Century.
If you put rubbish into a computer, you get rubbish out. But the rubbish coming out of an expensive machine attains an air of respectability and no on will dare criticise it.
To estimate the time it takes to do something; first estimate the time you think it should take, multiply that figure by two and change the unit of measure to the next highest unit. In this way you allocate 2 days to a 1 hour task.
To err is human, but to really foul things up you need a computer.
The first 90% of the task takes 90% of the time. The last 10% of the task takes the other 90% of the time.
The number of formatted disks you have available is always n-1, where n is the number of disks you actually need.
The reliability of a computer system is inversely proportionate to the urgency of the task.