I do hope everyone in this area is as grateful for living here as are my agricultural and horticultural friends. Newcomers may not know that Howard Pugh from Ledbury holds very regular auctions of the most exciting and useful items one could imagine. From rare woods for turning and cabinet making, to mature trees and railway sleepers he has it. Whatever modern or ancient tool (hand or wheeled) you can find it at one of his auctions.
His highlight auctions are of general agricultural and horticultural equipment and over the years I have bought gloves, tree guards, chain saws, shredders, toppers, flails, and trailers, but the excitement doesn’t stop there. I have sold ploughs, cultivators, sheep handling equipment and boxes of rusty but still useful bits of tractors, gate fittings and assorted screws nails and washers.
Breakfast at Hazel Meadows is a tasty bacon bap with brown sauce and the toilets in the main office area are supermarket standard. I always come away either richer or poorer but always having learned something from other folk with a keen interest in a working countryside. I say ‘working, countryside, to distinguish it from a regulated, homogenised green landscape designed only to please the eye of a visitor.
June is the time when the cuckoo changes his tune. The females, having laid their egg in the nest of an unsuspecting and naïve host, will then enjoy feeding in our woods and fields prior to flying back to Central Africa. In fact, as far as Ruanda. There are seventeen varieties within the family Cuculidae in Ruanda, of which our own most frequent visitor is Cuclus Canorus, or common cuckoo. The Adult birds fly back to Africa in July a few weeks before their offspring, but I do not know what drives the youngsters to follow the flight of the adult birds. How do they know where to go. Is it to Ruanda, or just a food source anywhere in Central Africa?
(Incidentally, Kigali the capital of Ruanda recently hosted a world-wide gathering of Anglicans. Their Conference made decisions that many say will rejuvenate the church throughout the world).
However, earlier mention of wood and railway sleepers reminded me that in 2003 the EU took the decision to ban the amateur use of creosote, as a precautionary measure because of concerns about the impacts of creosote on human health and the environment.
Approvals for professional and industrial use of creosote products were allowed to continue. However, these approvals – made under the EU Biocidal Products Regulation (BPR) – placed restrictions on the type of products and on where wood treated with creosote can be used. Under the regulation, creosote is approved for use on railway sleepers, highways fencing, overhead electricity and telecommunication poles, as well as stakes, poles and fencing for agricultural use.
There are hundreds of thousands of fence posts on local farms, but the reaction of the authorities to the EU rules meant, that the life of a typical fence post was reduced from around twenty years to between three and six. How green, effective, or efficient is that? We all moaned and so the total ban on use of active creosote was postponed until 24 July this year.
Although the NFU has been working with The Wood Protection Association on the continuing use of creosote in agricultural situations, I do not know what will happen after July?
Coal-tar creosote has been used as a wood preservative since 1838 (Even earlier, tar was used to seal ships) and is used across agriculture to provide a safe and reliable service life in tree stakes, poles, and animal fencing. In fact, creosote was in a medicine, along with, coal tar bloodwort and opium called California Syrup of White Pine; produced and dispensed by Spaandermans Chemist in the village of my birth. It cured, after three days, a persistent cough I had for over two years, following my return from National Service with the RAF in Yemen.
For some years afterwards it always stopped coughs in their tracks, and as far as I am aware, it was sold only in the Spaandermans Chemist shop. It was however banned on account of its ingredients.
Spaanderman is long dead and his efficacious recipe with him. But, sixty-three years after my first spoonful, I can tell the astonishing tale of how one man’s efforts solved a problem the big chemists and regulators could not.
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View from the Pew 