Letters to the Editor - October 2009

I enjoyed the article ‘Close To The Hedge’ in the August issue. 

In my childhood I walked with companions to school along the country roads amid the hedgerows.
Returning home hungry we feasted on blackberries, wild raspberries, bilberries, vetches, and even sampled the sour sloes and haws; we never suffered any ill-effects from the wild larder. We slaked our thirst in wells from cupped hands and cooled our feet on a hot day in streams alongside the hedgerow.

In spring we loved to seek out the birds’ nests and watched the little ones grow and take flight, observing the nests daily on our journey.

Occasionally, we came upon a wasps’ nest and for some fraught entertainment we poked it with a stick, arousing the wrath of the wasps who chased us for many yards along the way, only to return when they settled for an encore.

In autumn the hedgerows were often draped with beautifully woven spiders’ webs picked out in the early morning sunshine.

Those were such happy, carefree days, innocent and uncomplicated, and enjoying nature within the hedgerows.
Margaret Riddell, Coventry

Sue Martin (Letters, August) did indeed see ‘turtles’ in the pond on the Ridgeway, Mill Hill, London NW7.

You might recall that there was a fashion to keep adorable baby terrapins in aquariums around 1960, but little terrapins grow into large terrapins and large terrapins are often called snap terrapins because they bite.

Some terrapins were released into the Mill Hill pond at least as far back as the early 1970s, and whenever we drove up the Ridgeway, past Mill Hill Public School and St Paul’s Church, we would all peer over to the right to catch a glimpse of the terrapins sunning themselves on the logs and rocks. They had grown to the size of large soup bowls and had a prehistoric appearance. The pond was devoid of birdlife for years and was very murky.

In recent years the terrapins have been removed so that the natural wildlife can recover.
Joy Haines-Croft, Finchley

Turning round to find the source of a loud squealing noise behind me, I was surprised to see a squirrel jump up on to a garden wall with a squealing, wriggling mouse in its mouth. By the time the squirrel had run across the garden, the wriggling had stopped so presumably the poor mouse was dead. I know their main food is acorns, nuts and beech mast but can squirrels also be carnivorous? Did the squirrel catch the mouse to eat or was it just playing, as cats do with their prey?
Elisabeth J Roberts, Sidcup

In the May issue a Mr James Rea said he was trying to trace a Countryman article on billhook styles by Jack Wilson.

I don’t have that issue of The Countryman but I have Blades 1932 Tool catalogue with a comprehensive list of billhooks, hatchets, adzes, hay knives, scythes, butchers’ choppers and coopers’ tools. To give you some idea, there are twenty-eight different billhooks, all named, as are all the tools.

I have copies of the eleven pages from my catalogue if Mr Rea is interested and would be delighted to send them to him. It is nice to know someone is interested.
Ron Clark, Tonbridge, Kent

I totally understand the frustration felt by Kay Spurr (Letters, July) regarding starlings at bird feeders.

If Kay has a perspex-type seed feeder she could feed black sunflower seeds; these are suitable for a variety of garden birds, including the tit and finch families, and siskins. The starlings are unable to open the husks in order to retrieve the seed from within. The downside is that, after a while, the empty husks can become a nuisance, especially if on gravel, but where they can be swept up they are very good for composting.

Other birds like the robin can often be tempted to take crumbs off a windowsill, where it is easier to chase starlings away — perhaps with a squirt of water.
Neil Coupland, Dumfries

Starlings (letters, July issue) can be kept away from seed and peanuts if your reader uses Globe Feeders as available from RSPB and most garden centres. The feed and nuts dispensers are in the usual tube but these are housed in a heavy gauge steel cage which is wide enough to permit the passage of small birds but not birds as large as a starling, blackbird or thrush. The globe frame is too far from the feed tube for these larger birds to reach through to the food.

Incidentally, have other readers noticed that robins are no longer solely ground feeders but have now learned to slip through feeder cages?
Ian Bennett, Lechlade

The article in the August issue of The Countryman about making corn dollies took me straight back to the early 1950s, when I was teaching in rural Worcestershire.

One Friday lunchtime, the very severe headmaster was complaining bitterly about some misdemeanour committed by his fifteen-year-old boys, and accusing ‘X’ as being at the root of all trouble. Later, plucking up my courage, I asked him privately when the difficulty had occurred;
on being told, I explained that ‘X’ could not possibly have been involved as he had been helping me in my classroom all that break-time. He understood, saying “That puts a different explanation on the matter” — nothing more.

The following Monday morning I was in my classroom early and saw the school buses draw up. After a few minutes, there was a knock on my door and in came ‘X’ saying a polite “Good morning, Miss”. He gave me a brown paper bag indicating that it was something for me. I thanked him and was asked to open it. Inside was a small corn dolly, as shown in the photograph of Bert Manton on page 77 of the August issue, but with string at the top not ribbon. I had never seen one before. ‘X’ explained that he had made it for me during the weekend. As I thanked him I asked “Why such a lovely gift?” His reply stunned me: “Well, on Friday you got me out of trouble, Miss, and that will keep you out of trouble.” 

Make of it what you will, but I still have the remains in the bag.
June Sturm, Stonehouse, Gloucestershire

Peter Naldrett’s article ‘George Orwell’s Scottish Island Hideaway’ and its photographs (September) were excellent.

Orwell was clearly fond of the island. He wrote to friends in London inviting them to join him there, playing down both the problems of getting there and the spartan living conditions awaiting them. Had his health not deteriorated in the late 1940s he may have remained there for many more years.

Despite the doom-ridden ‘Orwellian’ tag by which he is best known, he had a lifelong interest in the natural world. In early novels he wrote vividly of the lush haunting landscapes of Burma and the English countryside of his Edwardian childhood. He admitted to having “masses of personal experience which can only be used up in the form of novels”. If he’d lived longer he may well have left us a memorable pen-portrait of the lonely beauty of Jura and his sojourn there.
M G Sherlock, Colwyn Bay

In August’s Letters, John Timbrell expresses his appreciation of my illustration featuring ‘a man leaning over a gate contemplating the countryside’. He may be interested to learn that my model for ‘the man’ continues (even after the many years after his first appearance on these pages) in good health, but that his dog has long since rounded up his last stock, and rests forever beneath a shady shrub in the home garden.
Brian Walker

A real countryman, I was born and bred in the country from August 1925 until Nov 2005 when circumstances forced me to move, but never before I have experienced anything that has happened to me just recently.  My runner beans are just beginning to crop and knowing how important it is to keep them picked, I went along the row to find the few that were ready.  I was amazed to find those lower down had been attacked, not the whole bean like a slug would, but the individual beans in each pod had been taken out.  My conclusion – a mouse.  So, out came the mouse traps with some crusty bread attached to each.  Much to my surprise next morning a huge brown slug was caught fair and square across the middle – but why eat only the bean.
Do any readers know of such a thing?
Mr Albert Childs, Bognor Regis

Reading the article on wood in the August issue, I was reminded of the old saying “He who cuts his own wood, warns himself twice”  I still enjoy sitting by my open fires, with the flames licking up the chimney and occasionally “the hounds chasing the fox across the back brick” (little specks of soot glowing red and moving across)  My grownup grandchildren love to help cut and carry the dogs.

Their reward is hot buttered toast by the fireside made using the old-fashioned extending pronged toasting fork.
Countryman reader, St. Cleer

In answer to Sylvia Gurney’s plea (Letters, August), Chamber’s Dictionary defines ‘oont’ as the Anglo-Indian word for camel, derived from the Hindu ‘hunt.’

Kipling uses the word to great effect on his poem entitled ‘Oonts – Northern India Transport Train’ and has Tommy Atkins describing ‘oonts’ (camels) as transport animals.

A footnote reads: “ ‘Camel-oo’ – pronounced like ‘u’ in ‘bull’ but by Mr Atkins to rhyme with ‘front’.”
Donald Hempstock, Trowbridge

In response to Sylvia J Gurney’s letter, I can tell her that during childhood holidays in the 1930s, I found that moles were called Oonties.  A molehill was an Oonty tump, and you could call in the Oonty Catcher as required.  I think he also had moleskins for sale but don’t know what he called them.  This was in Herefordshire.
Ann Parker, Ross-on-Wye, Herefordshire

If an oont is an elephant then I’d hate to have an oont-tump or two on my lawn. A tump is a small hill so oont tumps, as they were known in the Midlands, were mole hills.
Lynne Hackles, Boncath

I have followed the story of oonts with interest. When I was a young child my mother and I took refuge in Gloucestershire to escape the bombing in Southampton. We were staying in an old manor house at Stroat, near Lydney, which overlooked fields peppered with mole hills. We learnt with delight that the local name for these was 'oonty tumps', a phrase I have treasured ever since.

There was a single track railway locally which, I think, ran from Chepstow to Monmouth. On occasion in spring the train would halt while the conductress climbed down to pick primroses.

The house, since modernised, could have featured in a Jane Austen novel, with its butler's pantry, servants' stairs and green baize door. It had a walled garden, stables, dairy and laundry rooms. A wonderful place to fire the imagination of a child .
Hilary  Unwin, Amersham

I refer to the letter of Sylvia Gurney in August 2009 issue of The Countryman. Although happily resident in Dorset, my home county is Berkshire. An old Berkshire dialect word for a mole is a wunt. Since in Berkshire, the W at the start of a word is often left off, e.g. ood for wood, it is clear that wunt could easily be pronounced unt or oont. I don't know where Sylvia Gurney went to school but if it was in Buckinghamshire (her address is given as Milton Keynes), Bucks is an adjacent county to Berkshire. This could explain oont for mole.
G A Allen, Sturminster Newton, Dorset

I would like to say a special thank you to John Phillpott for his charming and nostalgic article “you’re learnin, lad” which appeared in the June issue.  I could so easily identify myself and my own ‘Uncle George”, in my case, an Uncle by marriage to my father’s sister. It could in fact have been my story, though in truth I could not have expressed it quite so perfectly as John Phillpott has done.  It brought to life a very happy and memorable time in my youth.  Perhaps everybody has an Uncle George.
Hugh Waldie, Scarborough

Global warming in the British Isles is blamed for the decline in plants, insects, animals and bird life.  In most cases this is not the culprit.  It is pollution by air and water.  Undoubtedly there is global warming, but do not let this become the scapegoat to hide behind.

Air pollution from planes, road and rail transport is depositing films of unburnt fuel and chemicals on trees, grass, rivers and lakes.  Plus ever increasing sewerage overflows into the rivers, after heavy rain.  Existing sewerage systems can lo longer cope with the ever expanding towns and cities.
There are large areas of England and Wales that have little farming and no spraying.  But the grasshoppers have practically disappeared; moths, butterflies and much of the fly life have hugely declined.  How often is it now necessary to clean ones car windscreen from flies etc.  Only a few years ago this was a must after every journey.

Bats, Swallows, Swifts, Flycatchers are all in rapid decline.  The decline of Grasshoppers has resulted with sharp decline in Skylarks, Meadow Pipits etc.  The Cuckoos decline is from shortage of caterpillars, their main food. The decline in fly life on rivers and ponds is affecting many types of wildlife juvenile fish, Dippers, Wagtails etc.

This is only scratching the surface of damage being done to the wildlife in the countryside from pollution not global warming.
Mr R Glover, Abergavenny, South Wales

I do not live in the country but here in Southgate, London where we have pigeons or are they called doves, which reminds me that the old country people said the doves call sounds like “my big toe’s bleeding, my big toe’s bleeding……  My mother whose family came from Suffolk used to quote the bird as saying “if you knew Susie”.  Do any readers have dialects for the pigeon’s cooing?
Patricia Webb

I enjoyed seeing the Dylan Thomas quote on page 46 of your August issue. But I feel the fuller quote has more impact: "Nothing grows in our garden, only washing. And babies."
Colin R Field,  Chelmsford

On reading the article entitled Rough justice in the August issue in I recalled that a few days earlier seeing an illustration of finger pillory Discovering Churches and churchyards by Mark Child [2007], Shire Publications. The photograph on page 230 shows a seventeenth century finger pillories, or stocks, in a church in Ashby de la Zouche, though not in which church. The description in Rough justice was most helpful in amplifying that given with the photograph.
Marion Nixon, Broughton, Cambridgeshire

About three years ago, my family and I had two quite memorable experiences. We live in a semi-detached house and our gardens are about forty feet long. One day, we were very surprised to see a kestrel sitting calmly on a fence. It was a great thrill to see it, watching around and preening itself despite there being plenty of cats around. We quickly got our binoculars to see its beautiful colours and patterns around the breasts and wings.

Even though it was a beautiful thing to see, it did not better the sighting we had months earlier when a sparrowhawk landed on the metal post used for hanging the washing line. The post is six feet high and only eight feet from our dining room window. The sparrowhawk preened itself for nearly ten minutes and had evidently enjoyed a good meal somewhere. The kestrel breast patterns seem to go downwards whereas the sparrowhawk seems to have stripes across the body.

We could certainly tell the difference between these two birds, the memory of which still gives us a thrill.
Mrs L M Hill, Bournemouth

It was heartening to read about the Ancient Yew Group in the article, The Branches of Immortality (July). Sometimes words and names can help us understand a bit more than folklore or history. Yew is cognate Old Teuton ihen or ighen/ighwoz found in the old Germanic languages, it is not teutonic in origin but Achaean. The Achaean people named the Aegean Sea but colonised the whole of Europe in the Bronze Age. Some spectacular examples of their long bows made of yew have been discovered in England, dated to 2400BC. Ighwoz means ageless; one could say everlasting or even immortal. Igh is a dialect form of 'age', related to their egh for sky.

Another name in our islands is the Gaelic iubhar. The original pronunciation was iuvar, related to our own 'ever' used of eternity to come, and 'over', used of eternity past. Like the two-faced Roman god Janus, it looks forward and backward at the same time. The modern pronunciation of iubhar is iur; similarly our 'over' for time past became 'yore', now chiefly poetic – days of yore.

Welsh use the same word – Ior – as out of its titles for God; its basic meaning is the Eternal. Also related is Welsh wybr = sky, heaven. It is the heavens that give mankind its sense of time and eternity. Wybr lies behind our 'overhead'. The root-word belongs to the Iberian peoples, our very first farming settlers, so it has been with us for over 7,000 years.

In early autumn when the foliage is black-green studded with myriad small globes of fiery red like stars it is easy to see the connection of ideas.
Felicity Crow, Stroud, Gloucestershire

would like to advise readers that black swans have been kept on Dawlish Water river at the little seaside town of Dawlish as a visitor attraction for many years. The river is open to the sea so swans could escape if they wished. They are very popular with the visitors who feed them tit bits.
My wife and I recently visited Dawlish and saw black swans with patches of white feathers and wondered if they crossbred with their white cousins?
Henry Harris, Totnes, Devon

The picture of elderberries by Ray Kennedy (June) reminded me immediately of what was an apple orchard when we were small children before the Second World War. The fruit was beautiful and our mother made elderberry jelly which everyone enjoyed. I don’t think the old tree survived the war; certainly I have never tasted elderberry jelly since then.

We moved to the principal family farm just a few days before the liberation (9 May 1945) where the biggest cherry tree I have ever seen anywhere was still standing. The cherries as they fell gave us all great pleasure.

Sadly things have changed. Orchards are no more — one is lucky to have a couple of fruit trees in the garden.
Jean Arthur, St John, Jersey

I want to tell Wendy Nicholls of Kidderminster, that firstly, I am so jealous of her observation of the dunnocks. Why? Very few people, have witnessed the courtship of the dunnocks. She has witnessed something that is as strange as the very worst of the Roman Empire. Exaggeration? No. The female dunnock, lets and encourages as many males that are in her territory to mate with her. Each mate pecks at her vent to dispose of the semen of the one; what can you say? Who has gone before. The last mate is the one who will procreate his genes…wish I was a dunnock. Believe me, Wendy, what you have seen is as rare as rockinghorse… well, you know what?
John Derek Smith, email

With the debate over TB eradication raging, and without sight of any resolution under the current scheme, itself not a solution, for a while you have badgers and cattle cohabiting the same ground and cross contamination is possible.

I believe segregation is a solution, create countrywide wildlife park reserves for badgers, where they could live out their lives free from the fear of being infected by cows with TB and being run over and then the work with the eradication of cattle could proceed with the badger out of the equation.
These reserves could be set up on some of our less productive land, with a perimeter fence and a stone filled trench say, thirty inches deep and eighteen inches wide to prevent them burrowing out. Adequate food supply similar to the one enjoyed on dairy farms could also be established and maintained by slurry being put on the ground as required.

Badger support groups could place hides and observe badgers to their hearts content and they may even be prepared to subscribe to the cost of establishing and maintaining such parks.

These same reserves could be used to plant wild flower meadows and provide habitat for endangered species such as bats, butterflies, moth, flora and fauna.

A pilot scheme together with a feasibility study would need to be established if it is to work and be cost effective as there would be no point in replacing an ill conceived scheme with another. An area where TB is a problem would very quickly show some results.
Edwin S. Phillips, Birmingham

In the March issue a mention was made of educational books published by Arthur Mee. I have in my possession the complete ten volumes of his children’s encyclopaedia which are often referred to by my children and great grandchildren for scholastic needs. My father was a keen educationalist, and bought them for me pre World War II. All ten volumes are still in very good condition.
Cllr Kathleen C White, Westbury, Wiltshire

While browsing through an old edition of The Countryman (July 2002), I came across a letter concerning crows attacking windows. We currently have the same problem and have yet to find a solution to the problem. We have tried hanging numerous items across the windows – CDs, tinsel, windchimes, lace etc – and also putting stickers on the windows but to no avail. The crows continue to peck madly causing quite noticeable scratches on the windows. Did anyone come forward with a solution to this problem?
Gwyneth Martin, Wakes Colne, Essex

Two items caught my attention in the July edition. The hostelry at Marsden Rock is not the only one in the country with a cave bar. The Trip to Jerusalem the foot of Nottingham's Castle Rock (see Arthur Mee's 'Nottinghamshire') also has one.

The picture of a bicycle-sidecar took me back to my boyhood in Cheshire, when as a family we cycled the county's lanes from Chester, led by Mum and Dad riding a tandem to which a sidecar was attached. In it was my little brother aged about three. On one occasion we traversed Hope Mountain covering thirty-five miles. Sometimes Dad would say 'Are you pushing Lily?' and an indignant reply would be back 'Of course I am Joe!'
David Johnson, Bedlington, Northumberland

I enjoyed reading Graham Uney’s interesting article about the Great Fen Project but he needs to get his deer sorted out. Muntjac and Chinese water deer are two separate species and not alternative names for the same animal. The picture shown is a muntjac, distinguished by its short antlers and distinctive head shape. Chinese water deer have large ears and are unique amongst British deer in having no antlers, the males sporting tusks (long canine teeth) instead.

Both species are much of a size and are found in East Anglia, and so both species may occur in Holme Fen and Woodwalton Fen – they can be easy to confuse if you only get a brief sighting of something disappearing into the undergrowth.
Pete Smith, New Milton, Hants
Thanks to other readers who pointed out the error, Ed.

was interested in the editor's foreword (June) and reference to old words. I have two for you, both by my old mother-in-law Elizabeth, who was born in 1860 in Tilehurst, Berkshire. If she was hungry, she’d say “Oh I am leer”; if I am right I think ‘leer’ is the German word for ‘empty’.

Then, if something wasn’t quite right, a little on the weird side, she’d say it was 'unkit'.

Not quite at the same time but back in 1940 when I married a local farmer, on the farm was a wooden building called the 'bowsen'. I believe this means an oxen stall. It was a fine purpose-built structure, entirely of beautiful helm planks, used horizontally, overlapping each other.
Dorothy Wise, Bampton, Oxon

All life is precious, and this includes farm animals bred to provide food for humans. In their short life they should be treated kindly and given the best living conditions possible. Surely a fit happy healthy animal produces a much better quality of food.

With this in mind, I was absolutely disgusted to see on television milking cows kept in a barn, each with its own stall, allowed to walk to the milking area three times a day. These cows were Holsteins, a very large cow, making their individual quarters very cramped to lie down. They are bred to produce large quantities of milk to all intense and purposes – a living milk machine. What a life, not to experience the sun and fresh air and taste fresh green grass.

I am not a farmer, neither am I a crank, but surely a better quality of milk would be produced from cows living as nature intended, able to eat, sleep and exercise in good clean open fields?

Why do farmers have to go to these extreme measures to produce our food? Battery hens, and now it seems battery cows. One answer is that farmers are not given a fair rate of pay for their produce and the public will not or cannot in some cases pay extra for humanely produced food. It all comes down to money.

Is the only way forward in farming to turn animals into food producing machines, living in conveyor belt conditions, because that appeared to be the fate of the cows on television.
Jean A. Dendy, Evesham, Worcs

It was interesting to read in the June issue about the sea eagle being frightened off by a pair of skuas. In our area on the South Coast, we frequently see buzzards and occasionally kestrels and sparrowhawks being encircled and chased away by smaller birds such as black-headed gulls, starlings, jackdaws, crows and rooks.

Regards the sea eagle, I have always understood that another name for this amazing bird is the erne, but do not know its origin. Perhaps other readers may be able to help.
Mrs L M Hill, Bournemouth

I think that the Six Days Only (letter from Dennis Goode) comes not from the Bible but from a pub or off-licence which had a licence for six days only, meaning 'Not Sunday'.
David H Wild, Hemel Hempstead

It was a bitterly cold grey January day, early afternoon and the family pet collie bitch, full of energy, needed her daily exercise. Work and school commitments decreed that ‘muggins’ here was the only available volunteer. Across the main road to the canal over the Ocean bridge and down towards the viaduct, we wandered across the first meadow to a small wooded area by the river Frome. I looked across to the field to the other side of the river.

To see a heron or perhaps two is not unusual along the riverbank, but what I saw was a huge circle formed by fifteen ‘men in grey suits having a Parliament’. I moved closer to try to take a photograph, however this meant I was actually going downwards with the opposite bank rising up even higher in front of me obscuring the scene in the field.

This was twenty-five years ago before we had a sophisticated long lens camera. I couldn’t cross the river at that point and the field where they were didn’t have public access anyway. I remained watching them for well over an hour, the herons didn’t move. Eventually I was so chilled and the dog was disgusted with my lack of interest in her that I finally had to leave them.

I don’t know how long they had been there before I arrived, nor how long they stayed after I departed. I wonder what was being discussed and the conclusion they came to after their long debate.

As I said, I was unable to capture this on film, so believe me or not that is what I saw. Has anyone else ever witnessed a herons' parliament?
Rosemary Bodenham, Stonehouse, Glos.

I was so pleased to read about the cowslip in the May issue. Twenty-one years ago I planted a hectare of agricultural land with a very basic mix of non invasive grasses and six wildflower including cowslips. When they first grew, they were about two inches high, with one flower head – in the spring the meadow was yellow with cowslips – absolutely beautiful, with primroses, violets, oxslips and fritillary.
At the time of writing it is covered with yellow rattle, meadow buttercup and about three hundred spotted orchids.
Mrs P R James, Sudbury, Suffolk

I happened to stay a few days in Market Lavender and plodded where I could on the Great Plain. Just a thought, I presume as the land is owned by the MOD, it is safe from indifferent developers who could destroy the present countryside?
Robert Brian, Cardiff

We welcome readers' letters, which should be sent to:
Countryman, The Water Mill, Broughton Hall, Skipton, North Yorkshire BD23 3AG
Or email: editorial@thecountryman.co.uk

The editor reserves the right to edit letters for length and clarity.