Your countryside
HAVE YOUR SAY ON RURAL ISSUES
Share your views and opinions by writing to us at: Have your say: BBC Countryfile Magazine, Eagle House, Bristol BS1 4ST; or email editor@countryfile.com, tweet us @CountryfileMag or via Facebook facebook.com/countryfilemagazine
SOUNDS OF THE COUNTRYSIDE
letter of the month
*We reserve the right to edit correspondence
I enjoy listening to the BBC Countryfile Magazine Plodcast while I work in various private gardens.
I’ve been meaning to send this sound in for some time. I stuck my head out of the door on Christmas Eve morning, as I could hear the sound through our kitchen window. We had at that point (we’ve since moved) a scrubby corridor between our property and the neighbours at the foot of our garden and adjoining us. We often had a family of foxes passing through the bottom of our garden or even playing in it. One year, there were five cubs and two adults, including a couple of cubs we reckoned were twins.
The sound emanating from next door is rather distressing; we thought it was a fox but could it have been a hedgehog? I’ve only seen a hedgehog twice in the garden. Once when I slept in my bivvi bag and was woken by a sound at 3am and I watched it run across the lawn. The other was seen last year when we camped as a family in the garden. My youngest son and I were looking through his telescope at the stars when we heard a sound and saw one walking around the garden.
Editor Fergus Collins replies:
Thank you so much for this. You can hear this recording at the end of Plodcast episode 137 (season 11, episode six): pod.fo/e/10e25e. We love to receive audio from the countryside that we can include in the Plodcast – anything from birdsong to waterfalls to eerie fox noises such as these. Please send recordings to editor@countryfile.com.
THE PRIZE: This month’s star letter wins an Osprey Sportlite 25-litre daypack, worth £90. The new Sportlite is designed for walkers and outdoor adventurers and features the AirScape™ backpanel for ventilation and comfort, plus mesh side bottle-pockets. Sportlite combines high-performance features with durable, recycled and sustainable fabrics. ospreyeurope.com
HEARTBREAKING CRUELTY
The Panorama programme that aired on BBC One on 14 February about intensive dairy farming brought me to tears. My partner and I were shocked at the treatment of the cows and their calves.
I had only just read Adam Henson’s article in your magazine celebrating the motherly love of British cattle. We had no idea some dairy farms kicked and dragged the cows if they slipped in the milking pens, amongst other ill treatment.
I would gladly pay more for my milk; I usually buy it from the supermarket but not any more, if it comes from one of these intensive farms. To have their calves taken away just after giving birth, trying to lick the calf clean while it is being wheelbarrowed away, then seeing the mother calling to it – it’s so cruel.
It was a hard watch and something that will always stay with me.
PERFECT PLODCASTS
Thank you all so much for your first Plodcast of the season – it was joyous! Your walk in Somerset’s Steart Marshes with Ben Hoare was a winter tonic and was full of all the wonderful elements we have come to expect from your Plodcasts.
I especially loved hearing the curlew calls –a truly haunting and hopeful sound – and it was heartening to hear how many of these you sighted, together with the lapwings and redshanks.
We were also treated to the whoosh of dunlin wings in a murmuration. Is there any chance we could have a Sound Escape of this at some point? Thank you so much, Hannah Tribe, for keeping the Sound Escapes going – they are always a treat.
Fergus, you ask for ideas for new Plodcasts and, although I always enjoy all your guests, I still love the ones where you are walking in the countryside that you love, describing the scenery and the nature surrounding you. You are a gentle, thoughtful and informative companion on my own urban walks and transport me to a world away from the issues of the day.
Editor Fergus Collins replies: Thank you for the kind words. I would love to capture the sound of a dunlin flock – or a starling murmuration. I shall make it my mission in 2022. You can find this episode here: pod.fo/e/1058c7
TIME TO TURF IT OUT
Turf growers in the UK are filling the agricultural landscape with plastic that will not biodegrade. This contamination is being ignored by the Environment Agency and Defra and if it is not highlighted and stopped immediately, the food chain will also become contaminated. Livestock and horses will ingest it.
The use of millions of miles of plastic mesh must be stopped, as the waste it leaves is virtually impossible to remove from the soil. These unscrupulous growers and sellers are driven by high profit and do not care about the environment or the permanent damage they are doing. They move from field to field, landowner to landowner, leaving behind their legacy of plastic pollution and removing valuable topsoil that takes 100 years for nature to create an inch. This is not sustainable or acceptable.
REMEMBERING THE NIGHTINGALE
In the BBC archives, there is a recording from 1924 of a cellist, Beatrice Harrison, playing her cello in her garden with a nightingale singing in the trees overhead. Eighteen years later in 1942, the BBC engineers were recording nightingales when bombers started flying overhead to a raid in Europe and this was subsequently played in a broadcast.
We lived on a farm on the coast of Suffolk. In front of the house was an area of woodland, where we used to watch the red squirrels in the trees and nightingales sang in the summer nights. My father was so taken with the 1942 recording that one night, when there were bombers flying overhead to a raid somewhere in Europe, he woke me and my brother, took us outside and we listened to the nightingales singing against the sound of the Merlin engines passing by.
Reader Q&A
“Being an avid forest walker, living as I do on the edge of Epping Forest, I was interested in your article on the mysteries of the winter wonderland in the January 2022 issue. Especially the part about mosses, in which I found myself intrigued when it stated that moss tends on grow on the south-west side of trees, to attract the sunlight. Can you please confirm this? When I was a Boy Scout, I was told that moss tends to grow predominantly on the northern side of trees because that side stays damper, which mosses prefer. Your help in clearing this matter up would be gratefully appreciated.“
Geoffrey Rolfe, Epping, Greater London
Editor Fergus Collins responds:
The Woodland Trust has a good article by botanist Helen Keating on this. Essentially, the north side of a tree gets the least sunlight and so is likely to o er the damp conditions moss needs. However, she states “Moss could grow anywhere as long as there’s water, not just the north side of surfaces. For instance, the direction of prevailing wind and rain can influence where moss grows. So don’t rely on it if you’re lost in the woods.”
woodlandtrust.org.uk/blog/2020/01/moss-and-trees/