Normally there would be no need to go beyond Woodcutts, since everything a person could wish for in the countryside is here, but perhaps sometimes it is worth while travelling further than usual, simply to get a comparison. Even then it is not necessary to think in terms of exotic holiday resorts, at latitudes far south of Dorset.
No indeed, in fact the first port of call, is north of Woodcutts. (The fact that a famous person of the female sex has recently purchased property there, in no way influenced this decision.) The area referred to is the downland north of Ashmore, overlooking Shaftsbury to the north-west and Ludwell directly to the north. The grassland here, has over the last few weeks been showing off, in their splendour, a host of, not golden daffodils, but radiant yellow cowslips. In this case a host must equate to millions. To think that last year the National Trust instigated the national cowslip count, to ascertain the population of what was thought to be a disappearing species of wild flower. This is not the only place where the revival can be seen, they are appearing everywhere on the roadsides. They have even recently been very evident on the verges of the main Salisbury, Blandford road, not just in one place but fairly evenly spread over the whole length. To explain their presence on the downs is comparatively easy, along the roadsides is more difficult, unless as has been suggested to me, that they are planted or sown by man. It has been inferred that the county councils may be responsible, and even that motoring associations have been giving away wild flower seed, for members to distribute around the countryside. Whatever the cause, long may it continue.
The downland scenario is somewhat easier to explain, and I am afraid not good news for everyone. Cowslips are indigenous of poor grassland on shallow calcareous soils, low in fertility and grazed at very low stocking rates. Since foot and mouth disease of last year, plus the radical changes in agricultural markets, it has simply meant that there isn't the stock to graze all the downland intensively any more. Even if there were, at current prices it would be completely uneconomic, hence no fertilisers are being spread and what grass there is hardly sees a grazing animal. This means that vegetation can grow in its own time, neither being bitten off nor trodden in by cloven hooves, "The cowslip reigns". Unfortunately what is good for the cowslip is not good for the farmer. This is .just another environmental problem to which there is no obvious answer.
Cowslips are by no means the only wild flowers to be excelling themselves this year. Buttercups on the water meadows in the Chalke Valley have changed the grazing from a verdant green to a golden, buttery yellow. This is of course where the traditional meadows remain, certainly not on the acreage of tightly mown grass destined to be harvested for turf, to be laid possibly in a garden many miles from where it was cut. Just another environmental problem, ( the word disaster could be used here,).It simply depends on whether you are a farmer making a livelihood, a turf contractor making a living cutting and laying turf, a person purchasing a ready made lawn or simply a conservationist who is fighting the changing world.
It certainly isn't all doom and gloom though; anybody who has travelled across Handley Common towards Tollard will have seen the glorious display of the bluebells, at first accompanied by the very fragile, white, short lived wood anemone and later by the less delicate ransomes or wild garlic. These are of course woodland plants, but anybody passing the places where they grow can't fail to see them even if they are driving.
Other, easily distinguished flowers, include the red campion and cow parsley, both very evident in their displays this year on the roadsides. This brings up another contentious, environmental matter, should all the roadside verges be cut and maintained like lawns? Many will say, of course, in the interest of road safety, or if late for work or simply one of us who believes that the speed limit on a particular stretch of highway is decided by the pace at which one can travel without leaving the aforesaid highway. Others for the sake of our cowslips, red campions, cow parsley et al., will want to see them unshorn. While mentioning traffic, I would like to make a personal appeal to all" Off Road" riders and drivers, "Please don't do it." If you must take a four wheel drive or a motorbike onto a track, please ensure you are allowed to by law. If you are, I believe that if it is a public place, a licence, insurance and possibly road tax will be necessary. (It certainly will be if you have to travel on the road to get there.) When off road, please realise that people could be walking and find difficulty in taking evasive action, or if riding horses, to control their mounts. (Horses do not like sudden movements or noise, and being subjected to same, could become uncontrollable, resulting in a serious accident)
There has been a fairly long interlude, for which I apologise, but even I have to eat. The time was utilised to a good cause, in fact, something I do rather well had to be altered, namely my typing mistakes. I appreciate you will find it difficult to believe, but the letter "k" still insists on moving around this "k"eyboard of its on volition.
Anyway back to the three 'fs', flowers, farming and * horses. Today I walked some forty yards into a field of last year's com stubble, now set aside. This field will remain uncultivated for all this growing year, for leaving it so; the farmer will receive monetary compensation. Now apart from not adding to a grain mountain, which would be subsidised by the general public, what other benefits are there? Well after my short foray today, I can tell you, providing a total herbicide is not used, the answer is wild flowers. In the short distance I walked, I saw forget-me-not, red and white campion, heartsease, knapweed, dandelion, groundsel, chickweed, creeping thistle, several umbelliferae including wild carrot, buttercup and shepherds purse to name a few that come quickly to mind. This is one case environmentally, where most people if not all are winners.
At this point I must leave nature to take its course, albeit a spectacular one so far for this year, with its spectacular colours and diversity of species and hopefully a step in the right direction for all our sakes.
With all of God's creation creating such a diversion this year, the very important results of the down the lane, Woodcutts Census have not been published. So please accept my apologies and put it down to government cut backs. Here they are now in tabular form, if between the computer and I, we can manage it. (This machine still has a will of its own, the letter ,k, will prove that.)
| Year | 1999 | 2000 | 2001 | 2002 |
| Total Residents | 17 | 23 | 28 | 24 |
| Adults | 15 | 16 | 16 | 15 |
| Schoolchildren | 2 | 8 | 8 | |
| Pre-school children | 2 | 5 | 4 | 1 |
| Total average age | 41.84 | 30.56 | 26.40 | 32.50 |
Now what do these results tell us? Firstly it must be mentioned that sadly we have lost our oldest resident of last year, as the regular reader will know. What will not be known generally, is that three of our youngest four members moved away with their parents.
This has meant that we have welcomed into the fold, four new adults but no children. If any of these people wonder how their ages were obtained to enable an average to be calculated, I can honestly say that they were estimated, but not to worry as all estimates are free.
Getting back to the results and what they might tell us, as far as I can see the only conclusion to be arrived at this year, is that everybody reading this is older than they have ever been.
P.S. A successor for the late laird is still being sought; it is now down to the last one and only contender. Hopefully Mr. Blair will make his decision shortly, but I believe it’s a forgone conclusion as I'm sure Mrs. Win Kirby doesn't want to be the next Archbishop of Canterbury.
May God bless you all, and thank you for reading to the end.
Please note that in this issue I am writing anonymously.
It all began in a most unlikely way. I was minding my own business, reading the second volume of Richard Holmes’s biography of Samuel Taylor Coleridge – ‘Deeper Reflections’ – having picked up the paper back version cheap in a discount shop. Suddenly out of the blue, there was this statement which hit me right between the eyes and just couldn’t be ignored. ‘It was an extraordinary appeal’ he wrote, ‘to appear in the year of the Pentridge Revolution, when working class leaders were being tried and hanged for sedition.’ The author was writing about Coleridge’s courageous challenge to the government of that time (1817) to have some real care and concern for the welfare of the ordinary working folk in hard times.
But what had this to do with Pentridge? The remark was thrown in just in passing as though it referred to something any reader interested in a literary figure like Coleridge would know about. However I had never heard tell of any such event. Could there have been some significant moment in the social history of England connected with Pentridge, but about which none of us knew anything? The Luddite riots, from 1811-1816 had been suppressed. The Tolpuddle Martyrs weren’t due to carve their niche in history for seventeen years yet. Should it really be Pentridge to which Trade Unionists flocked in May Day every year to celebrate a pioneering blow struck for the rights of workers? I wasn’t going to be able to rest until I had found out.
First of all I had to eliminate the possibility that there was another Pentridge where some dramatic historical happening had taken place. I was pretty sure I’d have known if any such place existed, since it’s very unusual in that its name dates back not just to Saxon times, as do most place names in England, but is made up of the Celtic words for ‘hill’ and ‘boar’ i.e. ‘hill of the boars’. Resort to the gazetteer at the back of my road atlas – confirmed that there was no other Pentridge. My excitement mounted.
The pages of such books as I have that cover our social history turned up no reference to any ‘Pentridge Revolution’. I next tried a history teacher at one of Salisbury’s grammar schools, which had better remain nameless. More specialised books were consulted, but still no mention. Salisbury Reference Library has several books detailing interesting incidents among agricultural workers in our area, but all rather later, and none connected with Pentridge specifically.
It was at that point that I asked myself, ‘Why should I be puzzling over this on my own? Why shouldn’t someone else be maddened by this infuriating mystery?’ Then it came to me – Dickie Riddle was the chap. I knew that once faced with this conundrum, he’d be as keen as I was to find the solution. ‘Leave it with me’, he said, when I’d phoned him and explained what was bugging me. Amazingly it took him only ten minutes to come back to me, with the news that he’d struck lucky when he’d turned up Pentridge in the index of a book on his shelf about the early days of the convict colony in Australia, ‘Fatal Shore’, by Robert Hughes (ESP or what?). Apparently fourteen men from near Nottingham had been involved in what was described as ‘the Pentridge Rising’ and had been tried and sentenced in 1817 to be transported to Australia.
So it was out with the road atlas again and, lo and behold, over the border in Derbyshire, but not too far from Nottingham, was a place called Pentrich. And the Oxford Book of Place Names explained that Pentridge and Pentrich are basically the same name, being made up of those two same Celtic elements. Pentrich, then, must at one time or another have been known, as is our local village, as Pentridge.
The assumption now was that Pentrich in Derbyshire had been the scene of the ‘Pentridge Revolution’. A cheap Saturday morning phone call to the nearest Tourist Information Centre, in Matlock Bath, seemed to confirm this. The young man who answered the phone couldn’t give me any details, but thought he had heard of such an event. More to the point he helpfully gave me the address of the Archivist at Derbyshire County Hall. (Being a curious chap I was left wondering why this should be in Matlock, and not in the county town of Derby!) The County Archivist came up with a full reply to my enquiry, and it turned out that a rising had been proposed against the government in charge of affairs after the end of the Napoleonic wars, when many ex-service men were without work, new machinery had reduced employment in industry, and generally there was great hardship. The success of the French Revolution twenty-eight years before had probably put ideas into men’s head. Only five years before a homicidally resentful bankrupt had succeeded in assassinating the Prime Minister, Spencer Percival. These men from Pentrich, Ripley and South Wingfield understood that there was a national movement afoot to oust the government and to play their part they set out on 9th June 1817, led by Jeremiah Brandreth (‘The Nottingham Captain’) to march on nearby Nottingham. continued in Aug 02 issue
The extracts below are from a letter sent out by the Michigan Department of Environmental Quality:-
It has come to the attention of the Department of Environmental Quality that there has been recent unauthorised activity on the above referenced parcel of property…… did the following unauthorised activity:
Construction and maintenance of two wood debris dams across the outlet stream of Spring Pond. A permit must be issued prior to the start of this type of activity. A review of the Department's files shows that no such permits have been issued.……..
The Department has been informed that one or both of the dams partially failed during a recent rain event, causing debris and flooding at downstream locations. We find that dams of this nature are inherently hazardous and cannot be permitted. The Department therefore orders you to cease and desist all activities at this location, and to restore the stream to a free-flow condition by removing all wood and brush forming the dams from the stream channel…….Failure to comply………….. may result in this case being referred for elevated enforcement action.
The following is the response from the land owner
A couple of beavers are in the (State unauthorised) process of constructing and maintaining two wood "debris" dams across the outlet stream of my Spring Pond. While I did not pay for, authorise, nor supervise their dam project, I think they would be highly offended that you call their skilful use of natural building materials "debris." I would like to challenge your department to attempt to emulate their dam project any time and/or any place you choose. I believe I can safely state there is no way you could ever match their dam skills, their dam resourcefulness, their dam ingenuity, their dam persistence, their dam determination and/or their dam work ethic.
As to your request, I do not think the beavers are aware that they must first fill out a dam permit prior to the start of this type of dam activity.
My first dam question to you is (1) Are you trying to discriminate against my Spring Pond Beavers or (2) do you require all beavers throughout this State to conform to said dam request?
If you are not discriminating against these particular beavers, through the Freedom of Information Act I request completed copies of all those other applicable beaver dam permits that have been issued. Perhaps we will see if there really is a dam violation of Part 301, Inland Lakes and Streams, of the Natural Resource and Environmental Protection Act.
I have several concerns. My first concern is - aren't the beavers entitled to legal representation? The Spring Pond Beavers are financially destitute and are unable to pay for said representation so the State will have to provide them with a dam lawyer. The Department's dam concern that either one or both of the dams failed during a recent rain event causing flooding is proof that this is a natural occurrence, which the Department is required to protect. In other words, we should leave the Spring Pond Beavers alone rather than harassing them and calling their dam names. If you want the stream "restored" to a dam free-flow condition - please contact the beavers - but if you are going to arrest them they obviously did not pay any attention to your dam letter being unable to read English.
In my humble opinion, the Spring Pond Beavers have a right to build their unauthorised dams as long as the sky is blue, the grass is green and water flows downstream. They have more dam right than I do to live and enjoy Spring Pond. If the Department of Natural Resources and Environmental Protection lives up to its name, it should protect the natural resources (Beavers) and the environment (Beavers' Dams). So, as far as the beavers and I are concerned, this dam case can be referred for more elevated enforcement action right now. Why wait until Jan 2002? The Spring Pond Beavers may be under the dam ice then, and there will be no way for you or your dam staff to contact/harass them then.
In conclusion, I would like to bring to your attention a real environmental quality (health) problem in the area. It is the bears. Bears are actually defecating in our woods. I definitely believe you should be persecuting the defecating bears and leave the beavers alone. If you are going to investigate the beaver dam, watch your step! (The bears are not careful where they dump!)
Being unable to comply with your dam request, and being unable to contact you on your dam answering machine, I am sending this response to your dam office via another government organisation - the dam USPS. Maybe, some-day, it will get there.