Covid has got experts thinking urgently about the risk of diseases passing from farmed animals to humans. We examine the major outbreaks of the past two centuries
Continue reading...Category Archives: Rural affairs
Littering epidemic in England as government spends just £2k promoting Countryside Code
Campaigners say unprecedented levels of littering and fly-camping are partly due to ignorance of behavioural guidelines
An unprecedented rise in litter, damaging fires and “fly-camping” across the English countryside is partly a result of the government spending less than £2,000 a year over the past decade on promoting the Countryside Code, campaigners say.
The code, a set of simple guidelines to help rural visitors respect wildlife, local people and landscapes, was relaunched in England in 2004 after the new “right to roam” law increased access to the countryside.
Continue reading...Land Rovers eyed by thieves in countryside crime spike during UK lockdown
Livestock, GPS equipment and quad bikes targeted as gangs took advantage of empty roads
Farmers are counting the cost of a sharp increase in countryside crime ranging from livestock rustling to the theft of tractors, quad bikes, GPS equipment and Land Rovers.
There was a spike in the theft of sheep during the lockdown as gangs took advantage of deserted communities, empty roads and concerns about food shortages during the early days of the coronavirus pandemic.
Continue reading...Pandemic has exposed Britain’s vulnerabilities says food policy review
Henry Dimbleby’s national food strategy starts with review of ‘slow-motion disaster’ diet, poverty, and post-Brexit laws
It is a year since Michael Gove asked the businessman Henry Dimbleby to produce a national food strategy. In that time the coronavirus pandemic has brutally exposed the cracks in the British food system so the launch of part one of his review this Wednesday comes in a new and urgent context.
After only a few weeks of lockdown three million people in Britain were in households where someone was forced to skip meals and go hungry.
Continue reading...Country diary: lockdown brings a wild quiet to populated places
Wharfedale, Yorkshire: There are moments of beauty, but the silence can also be eerie and strange, or mask an underlying hostility
In Lower Wharfedale, there are new kinds of silences everywhere. Around Beacon Hill, on the Chevin, the seismic roar of aircraft booming off to Edinburgh or Alicante from the airport nearby has given way to the white noise of a sunny heath in April; a silence textured with the bee-charged buzz of a goat willow, the delicate song of a dunnock, or the soft gloops of mating frogs in a pond. Along the verdant stretch of the Wharfe near Otley Mills, where peace is usually eclipsed by the rush of traffic on the A660, birdsong glitters in the fresh green trees like sun in a stream, and a dipper alerts me to its presence with the tiniest of chirps.
Related: Name that song - it's the perfect time to learn to identify birds
Continue reading...Country diary: last of the winter reed
Haddiscoe Island, Norfolk: Wally Mason may well be the last person in Britain to cut thatching reed the traditional way
It’s easy to lose your bearings among the vast horizons of Haddiscoe Island. This triangular grazing marsh on the borders of Norfolk and Suffolk, enclosed by the rivers Waveney and Yare, feels far bigger than its 2,000 acres, and more remote than its position just off the A413 to Great Yarmouth should allow.
Continue reading...The future is in our hands: drive to save traditional skills
A new campaign hopes to revive ‘critically endangered’ ancient techniques
Clay pipe making, wainwrighting, tanning and making spinning wheels – all are skills of the past that can offer us a sustainable future. This is the message behind a drive, launched this spring, to preserve endangered traditional crafts in Britain.
With a new award of £3,000 available, together with fresh support from outdoor pursuits company Farlows, the Heritage Crafts Association is calling for a renewed effort to save old skills and pass them down to the next generation.
Continue reading...Country diary 1920: early morning frost at the bottom of the great down
6 March 1920 The rough cocksfoot and spear grass along the lane ditches bent over as with a light fall of snow, while the horses shivered down their quarters
Surrey, March 4
Hoar frost fell heavily in the early morning – it came from the south in a mist that clouded the moon; the rough cocksfoot and spear grass along the lane ditches bent over as with a light fall of snow. Cattle turned on to the pasture land smelt the air and stopped to low; when, a little later, the horses were set, some to the harrow and some to the drill, they shivered down their quarters; the labourers at each turn of the field swung their arms and called cheerily. The sound carried a long way; it roused an old sheep-dog in his kennel, and presently the ducks called to each other while they waddled about the farmyard.
Related: Country diary: Hurt Wood, Surrey Hills
Continue reading...Country diary: this stone is a tabernacle of folk memory
Lledr valley, Snowdonia: Birdsong scatters like elegies here where once an old woman screamed her curses
This split rock with the wizened rowan growing from its cleft – I was first made aware of it by the old butcher from Dolwyddelan who gave me a lift along the valley one wet day when I was a young teenager on my first walking tour through Wales. He drew his Morris van to a halt, gestured towards it and gave me its name: Maen yr hen wraig sy’n melltithio – the stone of the old cursing woman.
In some earlier time, he told me, a woman would stand on top of it and scream imprecations at passersby. He showed me a kind of cave behind it. “Some say she used to live in there,” he added. He knew no more than those folk memories, which have hovered in my mind for 60 years.
Continue reading...Ramble on: the fight to save forgotten footpaths
After the Guardian article about lost rights of way, readers got in touch in their droves regarding routes they have been trying to rescue
Sam Thompson is standing at the end of the footpath that he is helping to save. There is no sign, just a gate and a post adorned with a few strands of barbed wire. “I started walking this route a few months ago. It connects to woods that otherwise I’d have to walk through a housing estate to reach.”
We are in the York suburb of Acomb, a former village now swamped by sprawling post-second-world-war housing developments. To outsiders, it can seem like an endless, stupefying maze of long bends and cul-de-sacs where car drivers are kept awake only by extraordinary numbers of crumbling speed bumps. “We’re in our 20s,” says Thompson. “It was what we could afford.” We climb the gate and start down a narrow path lined by tall grasses, soon dodging through a hedge to emerge in a wild meadow, beyond which lies a line of trees. The change from brick and asphalt to rural beauty is dramatic and totally unexpected.
Continue reading...Country diary: a house of God open to heaven and house martins
Segenhoe, Bedfordshire: The birds are stacked in the air above a shallow trench, taking turns to skim insects from it
A flying congregation had assembled by the church gate. We approached on foot, coming on the coffin route, a straight path through fields along which pall bearers had once carried the dead from the nearby village of Ridgmont.
Mourners might have walked through this meadow after the hay had been cut, as we did, and looked down at the grass laid out in strips to dry where it fell. Did a passage from the Bible come to mind? “All people are like grass, and all their glory is like the flowers of the field; the grass withers and the flowers fall.”
Continue reading...Brexit and bad weather puts UK farmers at risk of suicide, say charities
Crisis networks report rise in number of farmers distressed by uncertainty over future
Charities have said British farmers are increasingly at risk of suicide owing in part to uncertainty over Brexit and the impact of bad weather.
Distressed farmers have made dozens of calls to crisis networks and some have been placed on “suicide watch”, according to the National Farmers’ Union (NFU).
Continue reading...Need to sign on? You’ll have to walk 24 miles to the jobcentre
Each week, it takes Ray Taylor an entire day to claim benefits. He can’t afford the bus – and others in his Cambridgeshire town won’t have the option either when the route is cut in March
Twenty-four miles there and back is one hell of a hike to your local jobcentre. But when Ray Taylor, 56, had his benefits cut for 13 weeks after illness meant he missed an appointment to sign on, he had no option but to get out his walking shoes. He doesn’t have friends with cars to give him a lift, and with no money coming in, he couldn’t pay the £7 bus fare from the small Cambridgeshire town of Ramsey to Huntingdon, where he is registered for benefits. And if he missed signing on again, he would be sanctioned again.
Taylor, a former electrician – he couldn’t afford to update his qualifications after being made redundant and going freelance – is remarkably stoical about what could be a weekly trek. “If you’ve got a 9 o’clock appointment, you have to set off in the early hours to make sure you get there,” he says. There have been “quite a few times” he has set off at two in the morning to avoid penalties for lateness. (“Sanctions” can involve benefits being reduced – or stopped entirely.)
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