By spending more time at the field, both day and night, we began to be aware of the other wildlife who also enjoyed our field. Rabbits, hedgehogs, deer, foxes, stoats, frogs and a wide assortment of birds all utilised our field at different times.
With Liz being a keen bird watcher, it wasn’t long before bird-feeders began to appear to encourage the feathered visitors, and from this, the concept of making the field more nature – friendly began to grow. Primary amongst this was the thought of adding more natural hedgerow or woodland to the site. As a first stage, project Tom Jones the wayfaring tree occurred – the rescue and planting of an unwanted tree discovered via a Facebook posting.
And so, the plan for Englands’ Green And Pleasant Woodland was initiated. Our hay supplier and conservationist farmer Hay Jude recommended Hugh from Aveland Trees, an award-winning woodland designer and native British tree supplier.
A quick trip to visit Hugh’s onsite wood was very inspiring, as to me it looked like it had been there for 40 or 50 years, but in fact had been a barren field 11 years earlier. With Hugh’s invaluable advice, we ordered 73 pony-friendly trees for delivery from a wide range of native British trees I had never heard of.
This would seem to be a straight forward process, but little did I realise in our case this would be more complicated, involve three police forces and the review of video evidence in our dining room! On arrival at the field, we found a stolen car in our gateway, attended by two nefarious men. Liz twigged this immediately as suspicious, and whilst I started unlocking our gate and working out where we would store the saplings, she was on the phone to the police.
Not our car
Sure enough it transpired the car was recently stolen and had been involved in an incident in Lincolnshire. Much of the rest of the day was take up with various police related things, including showing five police officers from three counties the dashcam video in our dining room. It was like a bizarre hybrid episode of Crimewatch meets Countryfile!
Ponies in field
