Kentish Gazette Canterbury & District
Farmers play a vital role in helping nature
BY PETER GAY
Nature left to itself usually achieves a balance but our landscape has been shaped to feed a growing population and needs a helping hand to preserve our most precious habitats.
Nowhere is that more important than in Kent.
It is thanks to farmers and organisations such as the Kent Wildlife Trust and the Countryside Partnerships that we can stroll through plant-rich well-maintained woodlands, meadows and downs.
Without their involvement most of the lowland south-east would be thick forest from the Blean to the New Forest and beyond. Even the thin-soiled downs would revert to scrubcovered thickets.
In the Blean regular coppicing preserves the habitat for the rare heath fritillary by encouraging the growth of common cow wheat, the favourite food plan of its caterpillars.
On the downs grazing creates the right sward for some of our most beautiful wild flowers, including most of our orchids, and it is here that one particular four-legged creature plays a vital role.
Highland cattle, brown and black grazing on nature reserves and the Sites of Special Scientific Interest are a magnificent sight.
Cattle graze better than sheep because they eat the tough couch grasses that sheep tend to skirt round, and the Highland cattle are the most efficient of all.
With their thick woolly coats, perhaps up to 25cm (10 inches) long, they can withstand the winter cold when dairy cattle are indoors and are often gentle and approachable.
Several farmers in our area raise them. Because of their hardiness they are long-lived, some approaching 20 years.
Mistletoe and holly are brought into the house for Christmas but both have preChristian yule-tide links with the turn of the year.
Mistletoe has been increasing in east Kent in recent years, appearing on tall hawthorns and limes along the Stour valley including appropriately at Wye which means heathen temple.
The Druids and pagan AngloSaxons believed that mistletoe had magical and medicinal properties, that it brought luck and was an aid to fertility.
The Druids are said to have sacrificed pairs of white bulls beneath a tree bearing the plant.
At Christmas holly is associated with the crown of thorns that Jesus wore but it was also considered a sacred plant before the Christian tradition as it remained green with bright red berries during cold weather when other trees had lost their leaves.
To cut holly down was considered bad luck as it was said to protect against lightning and its powdered leaves could be made into a tea to heal measles.
In Kent it was usually known as the holm tree. Beyond Lydd on the edge of Dungeness there is a globally unique feature, holly trees growing in quantity through acres of shingle at the appropriately named Holmstone, a protected site on the army ranges.
But there are other shrubs that now vie with the holly’s red berries at Christmas – wall cotoneaster, a low-growing plant quite common on chalky banks between Canterbury and Folkestone and the taller Himalayan cotoneaster that also occurs in hedges and on roadside banks.
Neither of those cotoneasters is native. They were first imported into Britain from Western China in the 1820s. There is a native British species, cambricus, but it is restricted to a few plants struggling to survive at the Great Orme near Llandudno.
Foxes are very active at this time of the year. One got into a neighbour’s chicken run a few weeks ago and killed the lot, not to eat them, just for fun it seems.
I have seen them looking through the hedge and crossing our garden but they are almost impossible to keep out. In the wild they are beautiful and clever at disguise when they are stalking but they are not animals for urban areas.
This has been a cool November with a mean temperature of 6.4C (43.5f), which is 0.7C (1.3f) below the 30 year average The lowest temperature I heard of on the morning of the 30th was -10c (14f) at Bishopsbourne, a notorious frost pocket. Winds inland touched 60 to 70mph during Storm Angus on the night of the 20th with reports of winds over 100mph to the east of Margate.