Fine views from a village footpath

Richard Fonge writes:

The weather is getting warmer, after a seasonal cold snap. Our forecasters do seem to like to exaggerate their weather news at times, referring to certain weather situations as an “event”. Whilst it is nice to know what weather is coming our way, please don’t over egg it!!

Support for agriculture and conservation will be changing now we are out of Europe. As the Common Agricultural Policy is phased out, new National schemes will come in. The prime scheme is to be called ELMS. Environmental Land Management Scheme. We will await with interest to how these new plans affect the countryside as Farmers and land managers adapt to the new directives. A healthy balance must be kept between the two. 

Footpaths and their accessibility have never been more important, and over the last year, they have become even more so as an escape from lockdown. As well as a form of recreation, they give the walker a chance to observe and take note of the sights and sounds of the countryside and an understanding of how it works.

Farming in whatever form is about producing high quality food for the consumer, and to do this, an appreciation of your particular land type is paramount. Secondly you must work with nature. Try to beat her and your hand will be bitten sooner or later. To produce what is wanted in today’s competitive market is both demanding and rewarding, none better illustrated than, by those who can sell at their local farmers’ market and getting an instant customer response.

All parishes have their history, and Sulgrave more than most. The Castle mound, and its Saxon past, the Manor with its connection to the Washingtons and the first President of America. The lost village of Stuchbury, which has a fascinating past, researched with great interest many years ago by my late Mother. The old prisoner of war camp, on Helmdon Road, with its bases still visible, which housed I believe mostly Italian prisoners, and for many years after was lived in by displaced families.

The fields around us also have history and a story to tell. Every field has a name, the one nearest to the farm is usually called dairy ground, as that is where the cows grazed, but many have names which refer back to an event or an individual of the past. Some examples: I had a field called Mushroom at Kenilworth. It had one year produced mushrooms in abundance. Along the Welsh Lane, near Greatworth you have Newpiece, it was the last field to be cleared of woodland in the 19th century, and the adjoining field is Washbrook. The sheep used to be washed in the stream. Finally further along towards Helmdon you have the more sinister named Gallows Field, the scene of many a gruesome ending.

Richard Fonge

Winter Aconites on the Moreton Road

Richard Fonge writes:

January another wet month, with the ground extremely sodden, and our footpaths quite challenging to walk. When you live in the countryside as we do, the mud and water are all part of our daily walks at this time of year.

The sight of the aconites in flower up the Moreton Rd and Hazel Catkins out, reminds us that Spring is not far away.

Whilst there is nothing happening on the land Farmers are preparing for the spring, when as soon as the land dries out there are many tasks to do. Winter months are the time for maintenance of plant and machinery, and the making of any improvements to the homestead. It is also a chance to take a look at the business, never more so than this year with Brexit now completed. Challenging times are ahead for the agriculture business, which I am sure farmers will rise to. It will be interesting to see how new policies are going to impact on our countryside.

Preparation for lambing starts with the pregnancy scanning, followed six weeks before the start, with a booster dose of clostridial vaccine. There are seven clostridial diseases and this vaccine protects the lambs through their mothers first milk. Also at this time the ewes are often housed, and divided into groups, and fed according to the no of lambs they are expecting. It is exceedingly important that they are on a rising plain of nutrition leading up to lambing. To have healthy ewes and lambs born does not just happen, it requires planning of their feeding and veterinary needs.

Animal nutrition is vital in producing the quality product, whether that be milk or meat. Nutritionists are employed by most livestock farmers, to formulate their rations.

Finally on the Helmdon Rd, two small fields that have been let to get overgrown, have been cleared and the vegetation cut back and burnt. My understanding is that a stock fence will be put up and the field will be grazed for sheep. With the clearing that has gone on, the old prisoner-of-war camp site is now more evident.

Richard Fonge

Wildflower meadows on the Barrow Hill Footpath

Richard Fonge writes:

This is the second consecutive wet December, with the ground at saturation point. More planting was done in the autumn, than last year, but there is still much to be done, as can be seen up the concrete road.

Last month I briefly outlined agriculture development through the seventies and eighties, finishing with the consequences of over production. All arable producers had to take 10% of their land out of production, reducing to 5% after a few years, and there was a compensation payment. You could if you so wished put the whole of your arable land into the scheme, and thereby enhance the Environmental impact, subject to guidelines laid down by government. With the growing industrialisation of farming, there became quite rightly, concerns about the destruction of habitat and fauna, although it was sometimes forgotten that the building of houses, by passes, motorways et al were also damaging nature to an equal degree. By the noughties Environmental schemes were introduced, and farmers and landowners embraced them, to go along with the new payments. Margins of grassland were left round fields, beetle banks made, wild life mixtures planted, trees planted etc. Much good Conservation work, a lot of it unseen has been done over the last twenty years. On the Barrow Hill walk, you go through two wild flower meadows, rich in their diversity of plants, and past two woodlands of a young age, with strips of game and nectar mixes to feed a wide variety of birds and provide cover for the game birds. Pheasant and partridge shooting are an intrinsic part of rural life.

As we leave Europe new policies are being proposed, for farming and the countryside, which will obviously have an impact on the countryside we admire each day. Let us hope a balance is struck between food producing and conservation. Always remembering that you can’t eat the view.

We are so lucky in these difficult times to live in a village surrounded by unspoilt countryside to enjoy and relax in, albeit we are having to suffer the great scar of HS2.

A happy New Year to all.

Richard Fonge

Friesian Dairy Cows as kept by Richard Fonge in 1975

Richard Fonge writes:

This November just like last year is turning out to be a wet one. As there is very little to observe around the Parish at the moment, I thought I would write about how farming has developed and its Environmental impact on the countryside, and why it is so important that we strike a balance between food production and conservation. Back in 1972 a White Paper was published by the government called “Food from our own resources”. This predicted that by the mid nineties we as a country would be short of food. A series of measures were put in place to increase the production of food, with new farm buildings, concrete, hedge removal, plant and machinery etc all attracting grants of up to 30% to 50% with an accompanying business plan submitted to your local Min of Ag office. The response was positive, and the way forward was led by the larger landowners, amongst whom there were now insurance companies and pension funds and others from the square mile who were buying land as an investment with the high rates of inflation at the time. Up to 18% at one time!

What our experts at the time hadn’t factored in was that science and new technology would by the early eighties bring about huge surpluses. For example: A fungicide spray was manufactured for the first time, this meant that the leaf of the plant could be kept free of disease allowing photosynthesis to have a greater effect. Result – yields went up by 50% or so. The nutritionists came forward with better diets for dairy cows and along with much improved genetics, milk yields increased. I was responsible in 1975  for a herd of 160 dairy cows whose average lactation yield was 5,500 litres, by the end of the decade the yield had risen to 7,500 litres (A lactation is 305 days). The cumulative result was corn mountains, excess butter and cheese, even wine lakes. Milk quotas were introduced, with each producer allotted their own amount they could produce, and we had to leave 10% of the arable land fallow.

The industry and those that serve it were a victim of their own entrepreneurial success and with farms getting bigger, labour getting less and greater awareness from the general public, farmers and land managers had to take heed of the Environmental impact.

The coming of the 1990s saw the greater influence of the Environmental lobby, and I will write a follow up to this article next month explaining as I see it how the different interests have developed.

Richard Fonge

Autumn in the Sulgrave countryside

Richard Fonge writes:

We are now halfway through Autumn with the leaves just starting to show their different colours. The winter season doesn’t start till December arrives, so please ignore all those in the media especially, who seem to think otherwise. At this present time we need more stories that are uplifting and not a surfeit of doom and gloom. I think it’s significant that we have on our screens so many programmes relating to the countryside, because in general the bucolic scenes they depict show a way of life that we all find relaxing to watch.

The squirrels are busy gathering nuts to hideaway for the winter, but the albino squirrels seen down Manor Road and the area behind have not been seen of late.

The planting of winter cereals is well advanced, but some fields such as those up the concrete road look as if the new crop has germinated. In fact, what has happened is that the previous crop shed some of its corn when combined. It was delayed in harvesting by bad weather, so when harvested a lot of corn fell to the ground when cut. Those seeds have now germinated after the ground was cultivated. In time past the housewives of the village and their children would have gleaned the fields. To glean was to clear the field of any ears of grain left lying on the ground and to use them, depending on type, to feed the family or the chickens or the pig, both of which were so vital to the well being of the home. It can’t be stressed enough how important the allotment, the hens and especially the pig were to villagers’ well being. That was why the church and chapel harvest festival services were so important. When you live off the land, your appreciation of it and the vagaries of the seasons have a much greater significance.

We have around Sulgrave a great variety of hedges, the Saxon double hedge that defines the boundary between Sulgrave and Stuchbury, newer hedges that have been laid and grown again to form stock proof hedges and wildlife corridors, and those that are trimmed mechanically each year, and these too harbour so much wildlife and fruits. There are two good examples of skilled mechanical hedge trimming. The hedge on the left of the Magpie Road and those on the way to Hemdon past Stuchbury. Hedges were planted as a result of the Enclosure Act of 1773 and are a unique feature of the British countryside. Before the act, all land was common. Once enclosed by hedges, stone walls, ditches etc it came into private ownership and the English country scene of today was born.

Lark Rise  to Candleford by Flora Thompson is a wonderful account of rural life in the late nineteenth century. Lark Rise is the village of Juniper, south of Brackley and Candleford is Cottisford, it is thought.

Richard Fonge

Texel rams on Castle Hill

Richard Fonge writes:

As I write these notes the harvesting of crops is now complete after a lovely hot spell. Although the harvest from the land is in general a poor one due to the very variable weather conditions of the last year, the hedge and tree fruits are abundant. Plenty of sloes for the gin, blackberries, apples, pears, plums to preserve for the winter and conkers for the children and to keep away spiders

It is three years since I started these notes, and September as I wrote then is seen as the farming years end. Michaelmas day the 25th September is the day when farms change hands, either in ownership or tenancy. The land ownership has changed over the years, as the industry itself has evolved to meet the needs and demands of an ever more discerning public.

The land to the east of Sulgrave to Weston is owned by an Oxford College. The colleges of our two oldest universities are still owners of many estates but not as much as they used to own. Stuchbury Manor Farm where I was brought up was owned by Balliol College, Oxford until it was sold with the rest of the Marston Estate in the late sixties. They had a great way of extracting the rent by giving the tenants dinner in college twice a year, with the Master of Balliol, Bursar and estates committee always present. A very civilised way of paying.

A crop which will not be seen so much nationally and therefore locally will be oil seed rape. The flea beetle the main pest to the crop since the banning of neonecotins has been hard to control, to such an extent that many farmers have not sown oil seed rape this year. Therefore I can see more beans and linseed being grown, to maintain a healthy rotation.

Sheep are very evident in the pastures around the village, and with a gestation period of 145 days it will soon be time to put the Rams in with the ewes for lambs to be born in early spring. The Suffolk ram with its black face was for many years the main crossing ram. Whilst still popular, the Charolais and Texel have superseded it as they can produce a great butcher’s lamb. Those eight young rams that have been grazing Castle Hill all summer are Texels and at some time this Autumn all their Christmas’s will come at once!

Richard Fonge

Richard Fonge combining at Stuchbury in 1966

Richard writes:

August started out fine with the combines at work, but with this wet spell in the middle it now looks as if an early harvest will not be happening. Spring barley and spring beans up the Moreton road are nearly ready, as is the wheat up the concrete road. This is a crop I have been closely following. It was sown into a good seedbed and has despite the very dry April/May ripened into what looks like a high yielding crop. I expect it will go for bread making. As a retired farmer I get great pleasure seeing such a crop develop, similarly with the lambs reared on the Stuchbury footpath, with the weaned ones now eating the stubble turnips. These lambs were born to good ewes and sired from quality Rams. That can be seen by their conformation with the meat being laid down in the right areas.

Two crops seen in the area are what are called green cover crops, sown to land where no normal crop has been planted, (this year due to the wet Autumn/winter). They have been planted to stop soil erosion and provide green manure when incorporated back into the soil. One can be seen on the footpath on Barrow Hill. This is a clover growing densely, with the weed fat hen growing through it. The other was the buck wheat plant with its yellow flower, seen up the Moreton road and on the way to Helmdon. Bees love it as a source of nectar. Happy beekeepers!

With yields of all crops expected to be down this year, food security is now a subject very much back on the agenda. With the events of the last six months very much in mind, it makes it so much more essential that we as a country produce the food we require to feed the population. A true sobering fact is that at present we produce 64% of our needs. In other words we would run out of our yearly supply on August the 20th.

The feel of approaching Autumn can be seen with the ripening of the blackberries and sloes, and the gathering of swallows on the electric lines, ready for their migration next month.

Finally a true tale of four brothers, who farmed along the Welsh Lane, the eldest of whom, called Charlie, had a black patch over an eye that he had lost as a boy. They bought a colour television when they first came out and said to a neighbour that it was like this “Our Charlie were now blind and deaf, so us have bought him a telly to keep him happy”. Characters fondly remembered from a bygone age.

Richard Fonge.

Polo Pony

Richard Fonge writes:

July is the month which sees the start of the corn harvest. The field of oil seed rape off Park Lane will soon be ready, but it will be some time before the other crops around the parish are ready, as they were Spring sown, and therefore later ripening.

The lambs have been weaned from their mothers. Within three days they have forgotten about each other, and if re-united would not bond back. At four months of age the ewe is ready to be weaned from her lamb if it has not been sold already for meat. The exception are the later lambing Romney Marsh breed, seen in the fields behind Wemyss Farm.

The horse is an ever present animal seen in the fields and being exercised around and through our village daily. These horses, depending on their type have various uses. We have point to pointers, who race over fences and are ridden by amateurs and they are thoroughbreds. The hunter is a thicker set horse, ridden for pleasure and following hounds in winter. These horses usually stand between fifteen and seventeen hands tall. A hand being four inches, and the measurement from ground to the top of the withers. We have polo ponies, a smaller horse as the name implies, used for that summer sport. A quick and nimble animal, often imported from Argentina. And of course the every day hack and pony ridden purely for pleasure.

Together they are a vital cog in the rural economy, bringing much employment, as they have done over the centuries. As a youngster I can remember bringing my pony to be shod by George Gascoigne at the forge in Church Street. With no traffic so to speak, he did his shoeing on the road outside the forge door, or if wet in the trap shed opposite. He was another village character of his day, who had no idea of time, and was upset when the street light went out at midnight, on one occasion, when he was still milking his cow by hand beneath it.

Click here to visit the website page with photographs of the old forge and George shoeing horses.

The past months have been challenging for us all, but here in Sulgrave we have blessed ourselves in the fact that we have a rural setting. It seems that many more people are thinking of moving from an urban to a rural location. In doing so they must embrace the country way of life. Agriculture is the prime industry, shaping the countryside, followed by the horse in many areas and they along with the footpaths and woodland enable us to walk and observe our surroundings, at our leisure as we go about our daily tasks.

Richard Fonge

Pale blue flax (linseed) flowers contrast with a solitary poppy

Richard Fonge writes:

The consequences of a very wet Autumn/Winter, followed by two exceptionally dry months in April and May, can be seen in the crops around the parish and further afield. As you walk the path to Barrow Hill, the two fields of wild flowers are full of butterflies and insects, having gone through the wood you come to a field mostly bare with a few clumps of wheat. This field was sown wheat in October and the water-logging of the soil over the winter has killed it all except for those small clumps.

Up the gated road the spring wheat is coming into ear, and do take note how the green the leaves are and free from disease. This means a fungicide has been applied at the right time, so that the leaf can maximise the sunlight for photosynthesis to take place, thereby improving the quality and quantity of the grain. The beans up the Moreton road are in flower and like the other crops need some more rain.

On the Stuchbury path fodder turnips have been planted above the electric fence for the sheep to graze at a later date. The yellow flowers are those of charlock weed.

The other crop widely grown this spring is the linseed plant, now in flower creating a sea of blue. Linseed seeds are crushed for their oils, being used in paints and oiling of certain woods, and the oil has medicinal uses. The fibres of the plant were once used extensively to make linen, in particular bedding and tablecloths. But why are we seeing so much planted this year? Two reasons I would suggest. Weather and agronomic. For some years now an invasive grass weed, called black grass has been difficult to control in cereal crops, and by planting linseed, beans and turnips in late spring the black grass can be killed with a herbicide prior to sowing making control more effective, and hopefully making a serious problem less so.

Today our villages have changed so much from the time I grew up in the fifties. Back then most villagers either worked on the land, or had a close connection to it. I recall some of those characters:

Reg Isham who worked for my father at Stuchbury, who thought this new thing called an electric fence was useless, touched it wearing his hob nail boots, leapt into the air a foot and never went near it again! His brother was known as Samson. He had as a boy been asked to help push a thrashing machine that was stuck and when he did, it came out. Hence the nickname. He was waiting in Greatworth shop once to be served with his baccy, and was asked by the shopkeeper if he had planted his broad beans. The instant retort “The b—–s will be up before I get served!”

Finally a smallholder farmer in Marston St Lawrence said to a friend of mine he would pay him two shillings to pick his windfall apples up. He did so with the help of another boy, and when he went for his money, he gave them a shilling each!

Richard Fonge

January 2020

May 2020

During the “lockdown”, the swamp that was Footpath AN6, alongside the double hedge near Stuchbury, has become a desert!

Richard Fonge writes:

With all the concerns of living through a pandemic, what a delight it has been to hear the cuckoo. It’s arrival every year with its distinctive song was once taken for granted, but sadly we haven’t heard him for some four years, but on the 15th and 16th of this month he was in great song. Just like the return of the swallows in April, it is one of those events that always raises the spirits.

The natural world has great powers of recovery and the ability to regenerate. Two examples of this in our parish are the old railway line, where since its closure some fifty plus years ago vegetation has grown up naturally along that old line, a lot of it being the hawthorn or whitethorn now in full blossom and referred to as may blossom. The hawthorn and the blackthorn are members of the rose family. The fruit of the hawthorn are the haws, the Wild Rose the hip and the blackthorn the sloe.

The second example is on the Moreton Road or the gated road as it is more commonly referred to. Here the verges were not cut back to the hedge last winter, and as a consequence the field maple is already thriving and some three feet in height. Hedge maple like the ash grows very quickly and soon re-populates a barren area.

Lanes with grass verges like the Moreton Road were once used to graze cows, when there were smallholding farmers in the villages. It was my privilege to know a very successful farmer who died at the age of 101 in the early 1990s, who had started his farming career just before the First Wold War by milking half a dozen cows. His main source of summer grazing were the lanes around Berkswell village where he lived. Being free, it helped he and his young wife whose task it was to watch over them to get a foothold on the farming ladder. This was not an uncommon practice.

He also recalled to me that his grandmother who had died aged ninety at around the turn of the century, had told him as a young child how she remembered the victory at Waterloo in 1815.

Since the end of the wet weather, we have had a very dry April/May. This has resulted in a spring of slow growth, with a lot of land not being planted and left fallow to be planted this Autumn. Some fields have been sown to linseed as on the path to Stuchbury, others up Barrow Hill to what is called a cover crop. At the top of the Moreton Road can be seen beans on the left, being grown for animal feed, and on the right fallow land which has been sub-soiled. With this very dry spring and so much land not being planted after one of the wettest winters on record the harvest prospects do not look good. As I said in an earlier piece do not be surprised to see some foods cost more. I said earlier that nature soon takes back and thrives again, and after this year I am sure next will repay with a bumper harvest.

Richard Fonge