Matthew Gudgin (00:36):

Hello, I'm Matthew Gudgin and for many years I've been recording and broadcasting alongside Chris Skinner. If you're a newcomer to this, then welcome. If you've listened to us before, welcome back. For the first couple of episodes, Chris will be flying solo and introducing us to his home on High Ash Farm in Norfolk.

Chris Skinner (01:10):

The old grandfather clock in my hallway built by John Christian of Aylsham in Norfolk in 1777 is ticking away, telling the time and the time is for a brand new podcast. 
So this is Farmer and nature lover, Chris Skinner and a very, very warm welcome to High Ash Farm, A square mile of Norfolk countryside full of history, full of wildlife, and if we're graced with my presence for a few more podcasts after this one, we'll be exploring some of the history and some of the wildlife and exploring why that Norfolk motto of "do different" is exactly what the philosophy of this farm is all about today. 

So we're standing in my living room or I am, you're accompanying me as you will be in this podcast and future podcasts and I hope I can take you along and explore some of the secrets and delights of the history of the Norfolk countryside and the wildlife.

(02:33):

That's the bit that really excites me, the living heritage, but we're going to start off in my living room and beside me is a glass case. I'm just going to open the door if I can. Here we go. It's a tall glass case, a display cabinet, and inside, here we go. We are in, it's a display of flint tools. Not very interesting you'd say, but I'm going to go down to my hands and knees because on the bottom shelf and there are four shelves of tools through different ages of man and my very, very oldest Flint tool, roundabout 225,000 years ago. So an age that we know very little about, apart from the people that left behind their tools, the tools were made of Flint - back then they were very, very crude indeed, and I'm going to pick it up, there it is.

(03:48):

It's bigger than a man's hand. It's orange coloured flint and it's very obviously been shaped into the shape of a tool to do we don't know what with, perhaps to kill animals, perhaps to butcher them, perhaps to sort of harvest other food as well. But nevertheless, it's pretty obviously been napped. It's not happening naturally. There's a cutting edge to it - well worn - and I found this at High Ash Farm. It's one of the first Flints I found and got really very, very interested in my ancestors. Then we're going to take an enormous leap forwards in time, pop that one back, go to the next shelf, and these are far more advanced. They're perfectly shaped, fit into my hand really nicely. These are flint axes from the neolithic period, much more civilised period, cultured people perhaps, and their tools, again, they've left them behind for us.

(04:59):

This one in my hand has been to Norwich Castle Museum dated and it's 5,000 BC. We can add two more thousand years onto that. It makes it 7,000 years old if you're driving a car, I don't know what state that's going to be in in 7,000 years time. So you can see why we can get a bit of a picture of the history of the people that shared the Norfolk landscape at least 5,000 years ago. We know much more about them. Now, when I stand up now and look at the top shelves here, an amazing change. These Flint tools are tiny. This one just in my hand, absolutely stunningly beautiful, made of flint, very, very intricate. It's an arrowhead. Just going to hold it up to the window and I can see right through it. Now I know I can't make anything like that. It is stunningly beautiful, very intricate.

(06:04):

But as I look up the four shelves, I can see a huge change. Things were killing large animals, butchering in the lower shelves and coming up scrapers and different tools, double-ended scraper, they're all made out of flint - and then these top ones, it indicates some sort of change in the landscape that surrounds us. The North Sea was actually joined to Europe at one point because one of these Flints I took to Norwich Museum -  this one is green in colour and it comes from a particular region in Belgium where this flint was mined and shaped. And again, I found it on the farm here, but I was told very definitely by museum staff that it was imported and that totally surprised me that it was brought across the North Sea to Norfolk. So there was a trade in Flint tools as well, as well as the ones we mined here at Norfolk and particularly Grimes Graves.

(07:07):

That's one area where Flints were and mined and napped, and the skill in it is incredible. When you see these later tools, tiny little arrow heads, this one's triangular, a little sharp bit of the end to put in the stem of the arrow and then there'd be some flights at the far end. So you've got an accurate long range weapon and it shows that from the large animals that are being killed and slaughtered with the large tools in the Paleolithic era coming right up to only 5,000 BC, these ones there is a definite change and the intricacy of the flint work is amazing. Some of the little arrow heads have serrated edges. It's really, really intricate and that takes us to an amazing sort of past history of the people that we are related to whether we like it or not, and such an amazing time.

(08:06):

So it's a special day. It's the launch of a new podcast. It's also a special day for me because 74 years ago today I was mewling and puking because I've just been born a lot of neighbouring farmers will say "hmm, I can't see any difference today" , but nevertheless, I enjoy the Norfolk countryside. It's my complete passion. Just going to open the doors, walk out, and I live in an unusual house. Oh fantastic. Flock of starlings on the power lines going across the middle of the meadow on the other side of the field to me perhaps 150 up there, just sunning themselves. Sweet September sunshine, very misty morning this morning. And the house that I live in is called heaven because I'm looking over a square mile of Norfolk countryside. I can't see another house. I can see Norwich in the distance. High Ash Farm is about two miles south of the city of Norwich.

(09:07):

I can see Norwich city hall and I can see the top of Norwich Cathedral and it's a very high piece of ground. It's a square mile Norfolk countryside. How the glaciers left it at the last ice age 10,000 or so years ago when this part of Norfolk was covered in a thick sheet of ice. There's chalk under the farm basically it's a huge piece of corrugated iron, four hills and four valleys, all sorts of different soil types to relate to that history that those previous occupiers must have enjoyed as well. There's sands here, gravels, some peat, heavy boulder clay and chalk underneath, all with the flints in it, which of course was the substance that many old churches were built on. Napped flint brick walls, particularly up in North Norfolk, the northern part of the county, any natural building materials were used. So an exciting piece of Norfolk countryside.

(10:12):

And down in that chalk layer, huge horizontal layers of giant white flints. That's the substance you could make nap easily. That's the process of shaping flint into a particular shape. So there we are. That's what we'll be doing. We'll be exploring the wildlife on the farm as well as the history - and take us through the industrial revolution. I'm looking across the top of the farm yard now. Some really old, lovely implements. Some were steam driven, some were driven by hand, particularly on Saturday afternoons. There's an old mangel grinder there in perfect condition still could be put to work today. It's also got a flywheel on it if no engine was available to use it to slice up the mangel. And then the living countryside all around me, A fantastic piece of Norfolk countryside badgers, foxes, deer, barn, owls, little owls, hares, rabbits, buzzards, a whole variety which makes up the tapestry of the Norfolk countryside. And in front of me this week we've got the ivy in flower and in the next bit of the podcast I'll be visiting some of the hedges out on the farm once the sun's up a little bit more in the heat of the day. It's perfect final nectar flow for many of our species of butterfly, wasps, bees, hornets, all of which live at the farm here. So I'll be welcoming you back in a few minutes time and we'll go on an exploration together and see what we can see.

(11:56):

Welcome back to High Ash Farm. I'm permanently accompanied by my demented terrier who's just walking down the woodland track towards me as I speak. He's called rat. He's more trouble than I dare to tell you. He's always doing something mischievous, disappearing down holes and coming out in another part of the woodland. And I spend more time with rat than I do any other living creature, but we use each other. He can tell me if there's something in the woodland, his sense of smell and his eyesight is absolutely incredible. He's part chihuahua, don't tell any local farmers, that's not a proper dog. He's part Jack Russell Terrier and there's a hint of Pomeranian in him, but he's absolutely great fun and we use each other. Now, I'm going to walk across a track because I can already see something alone in woodland - you don't normally associate woodland with butterflies - but there are a few species that frequent woodland and all over High Ash Farm, they're 13 areas of woodland.

(13:18):

This is one of the smaller ones. It's four acres. It's called Woodcock Wood, heavy heavy clay underneath. Big clump of wild cherry growing quite close to me and some of the old gamekeepers years ago, planted some understory here and this butterfly has just flitted off one leaf landed on another, and I'm going to walk up right close, very slowly. Wings are open, beautiful chocolate brown on the upper side of the wings and on the lower wings, which were also open, some false eyes, each one with a little white dot in the centre. Oh, it's flitted off in a millisecond. Oh no, it's come back again, would you believe it is having a fight. I'm standing in because it's the heat of the day now early afternoon. And these are fiercely territorial and this butterfly's flying all around me now it just seen off another one coming into its patch and it's landed almost back on the same leaf.

(14:24):

So I'm going to walk back up to it. Absolutely beautiful chocolate brown colour on the upper wings and a kind of misty grey on the underside two inch wingspan. And on the four wings, the upper wings, some beautiful white spots, a creamy white, almost a touch of yellow in there. And this, I call them territorial because they kind of give themselves a little patch of woodland where the sun comes in from the canopy in between the trees, which are towering above me - and you have these little patches of sunlight and these butterflies comedere their own. It's rather like your garden if you like. You don't want too many other people coming in there. But when it comes to other male speckled wood butterflies, they see them off, this is my patch. And if it's good enough then a female will come and they'll obviously mate and start off the next generation.

(15:28):

Lovely Robin singing in the background. This is the month, it's September that robin starts singing again. Either it's out in the countryside or in your garden. They're finished their malt and they go kind of quiet from mid-July to mid to late August and then they start pairing up again. And you can hear that lovely song which I just heard. It's still singing somewhere in the background, quite faint because it's a little way away. Now in this area of woodland, it was clear felled at the end of the second world war, it was Corsican pine and Scots pine for the war effort, everything was completely felled. Just odd oak trees were left in the understory and they're now going up there, lots of ash trees as well. And what's unusual about this woodland? So if you come here in winter and want to see birds roosting, this is the woodland to come to.

(16:24):

Virtually every tree is covered from root base up to near the crown on some of them with Ivy, Britain's tallest stem twiner scientific name is Hedera Helix. And this time of the year, well Ivy's useful all through the year. If you're interested in conservation I should say then Ivy is the plant for you. It has something for all the seasons. And in future programmes we'll be talking about all the benefits of it, particularly as a hibernation site. So some of our butterfly species, brimstone in particular, nesting birds, obviously in the spring under the leaves on a cold winter's night in a deciduous woodland, you can't imagine how the wind howls through the naked trees that lost all their leaves. And ivy, with the way it arranges it's leaves close to the trunk like a little tent, an umbrella in there full of birds, the smaller birds like long tailed tits, robins blue tits, they're all roost in places like that.

(17:33):

Good place for winter food for our wrens as well. Sort of troglodytes the little cave dweller bird - troglodytes - a scientific name. They'll go into ivy and come out in another part of the tree and look for spiders and other invertebrates in there. And this time of the year, it's one of its sort of hot points of the year for ivy. It comes into flower on the south side of trees, those facing the sun. It comes into flower now and this whole woodland area is filled with the sort of heady aroma. It is almost a sexy smell actually. And it sort of permeates the whole bit of woodland. And virtually all those sort of dome shaped flowers have bees or flies on them. Bees collecting pollen and nectar from it in heat of the day. It's quite warm at the moment. And so it's an absolutely brilliant plant.

(18:30):

Something for all the seasons and one of our tiny species of butterfly, the Holly Blue haven't seen any at the moment, but there's lots in here. It is a real unusual butterfly because with its name Holly Blue, it brings off its first generation lays eggs on Holly and they hatch out. And these lovely pastel blue, almost wedgewood blue upper side wings on the small butterflies about an inch wingspan. And they have a second brood on ivy roughly at this time of the year actually. So they're really unusual species. So lots of insects sort of harvest that late pollen and nectar. And as the sun sort of gradually gets lower and lower from now on in the sky, the ivy on the north and east side of the trees will still come into flower, but much later. So Ivy's brilliant in the aspect that it produces pollen and nectar over a great long period of time, a long flowering period.

(19:37):

And then it produces those berries as well, the ivy berries in December and January to feed our winter visiting thrushes, those black coloured berries. And of course the birds eat those and then poop somewhere else in the woodland. And any seeds that don't get chewed up, drop onto the woodland floor and ivy starts all over again. Now I'm going to walk a bit further down the woodland because there's a sunnier area just at the bottom here. So I'm walking down a slight slope. These are old woodland tracks which were used for horse riding today, but they were originally cleared through the woodland for shooting. Many of the woodlands here at the farm were laid out in the late 1800s early 1900s, and it's some even longer ago than that, for shooting. And the woodland in some places were planted on the bottom of the valleys where the best soil is.

(20:33):

So you could drive things like the English partridge across the top of the woodland. They mixed woodland, conifers, Scots pine and beech as well because there's chalk underneath it and the beech loves the chalk. And so you have these high driven birds, which are fantastic sport. So just walking down a little bit more, we're now coming into the sunshine and it is warm, really warm. And now I'm looking out just scanning across all the ivy. There's some old trees that have snapped off and basically it's a huge clump of ivy growing over the stump and I'm just going to go close to one. And yeah, and it's that heady aroma. I can't quite describe it, but I think if you close my eyes and put me in the woodland at this time of the year, I could tell you what time of year it was.

(21:23):

It's one of those familiar smells that is really distinctive for that particular time of year. Yep, I can see one just walking on a bit more. Yeah. Oh, it's down low. It is sunning itself, although it's right next to one of the ivy, sort of the half barrels of ivy, I like to call them with all the pollen bright yellow on the little domed seed heads that's going to produce the seed. If I go up a bit closer, yeah, absolutely beautiful. I'm going to introduce you to Vanessa Atlanta. What a lovely name. That's a scientific name. It's the Red Admiral Butterfly. It's one of our migrant species, but because of our very warm mild winters that we've had, there's evidence and I've seen them here at High Ash Farm, actually overwintering as an adult, although they generally migrate up from southern Europe, Mediterranean region, strong flyers will come up perhaps sometimes with Clouded Yellows or Painted Ladies as well.

(22:33):

They're two other migrant species and quite a large wingspan, just three inches, a good three inches, 75 mil across the wings. When it's open, which this one is, it's being very obliging. Normally you get too close and I'm about five feet away at the moment. They just flit off and disappear to another patch and then sit there where their wings shut. And basically it's sort of sooty black on the underside. The side I'm looking at with the wings open, a sooty, really dark dusky black on the upper side of the wings, some white spots near the tip of the wings, and then two lovely sort of orangey red margins towards the end edge of each wing. And then the tail is kind of serrated with little black dots on them and bright orange, dark red, whichever, I don't know, because they call red admiral - what I'm actually seeing is orange and their food plant...

(23:30):

So they'll migrate up from southern Europe. The female will lay her eggs singly on a nettle leaf, another one of those species like our peacocks and our small tortoiseshell as well, which we'll use nettles as a food plant. Their eggs there and then the caterpillar will munch on its food plant and gradually kind of pull two leaves together with little silky threads and make a little tent just for itself really nice and hard to see. If you know what you're looking for, you see two leaves on the nettles pull together and that's where the caterpillar will eat its fill and then pupate, and then they hatch out. Now some evidence that some will migrate back to southern Europe and we've now, because our milder winters, we think more and more and now spending the winter with us as adults. And I certainly found them here at the farm underneath the old bridges on the farm, you can go in under the brick work or mind the metal beams on your head and with a torch on the coldest dampest sort of December day, you can see hibernating butterflies, some of which are Red Admirals. Love to see them here at the farm. Anyway, we'll be exploring more of Autumn in coming additions and I'm going to go back on the farm, do a little bit of work and then we might squeeze in one more little introductory piece to our podcast launch today. So there we are, the eighth September. Your podcaster is 74 years old today. I dunno if that's good or bad. All I know is I ache a lot when I get out of bed in the morning, but that's another story.

(25:25):

Welcome back to High Ash Farm. I've now moved to a different village. High Ash Farm encompasses two or three villages. I'm now in Arminghall and on the other side of the farm there's Stoke Holy Cross. And then just down in the valley there's Markshall where my father spent his childhood. That's a neighbouring farm now. So I'm now standing close to the bottom of a very large pit and it's called a marl pit. Now marl is interesting, I mentioned we've got lots of different soil types here at the farm sands, gravels, clay, some peat as well on some of the areas of the farm. And marl is a kind of mixture of clay with lots and lots of chalk in it. Now this is quite a hole. It's the best part of 50 metres across the top of it. It's almost a perfect circle and it's a good 10 feet deep.

(26:30):

And at the bottom here is some water just to prove that it's kind of impervious soil. I've just got to put my foot on the edge of it. It's very, very squidgy down there. If I go too far, I'll be disappearing into ankle deep sort of jet black ooze, which is where all the leaves have blown in over the last hundred years or so. Now these holes were dug for more than one reason because at High Ash Farm, just half a mile from where I'm standing, the old buildings were all made of clay block and that's made from marl, which is clay mixed with the chalk in it, obviously mixed with straw or reeds. And then it was put into form as it was sort of puddled up. You could almost play think you were playing with mud pies to make them. And the little formers were long planks of wood nailed together.

(27:25):

And each one you could actually put a division in and make yourself a very large clay block, which dried this time of the year over the summer months. And they ended up being about 10 inches by 10 inches on the end of them in old money and about 18 inches long to give you an idea. And they're quite heavy. Each one would weigh about 56 pounds or even a bit more. That's half a hundred weight in old money or 25 kilos at least. And then more wet clay was made and sort of put in between them. So it's a kind of form of mortar. And of course if that clay got really wet in the winter months, your house or your barn for your cattle would actually dissolve and fall back to the ground. So these old buildings were coated in tar and that sort of weatherproofed them.

(28:20):

And each year you'd give them an extra coat of tar. And I can remember the ones that the farm on hot days, the tar would run down the side of the old clay block walls, although they hadn't been re-tarred for years and years and years. Also, the other thing that this was used, I'm just bending down as I climbed up back up the bank and I can pick up some pure chalk cobbles, lots of it here. So the soil's full of it. And underneath that, if we went down a few more feet, we'd reach that perfectly level chalk layer, which comes in just off the coast of Yorkshire, sort of wiggles down through Norfolk under the downs and comes out the white cliffs of Dover. So it's a unique and quite narrow area of chalk. And just as it comes in on the North Norfolk coast, there's a wonderful chalk reef there with a really special habitat, completely different to the surrounding areas of sea.

(29:16):

So there we are. I'm climbing back up this sort of bank to the top because I mentioned the other use of marl and that was to improve land. Right back from the 1600s/1700s, it was realised that some of the lighter land, the light land and heavy land, that's really a term used for the difficulty horses had in ploughing the fields back then all oxen. So light land meant it was easy light work for the horses to pull the plough or to cultivate the land. And heavy land is sort of related to how much hard work it was for horses. So I got a wonderful photo of my father with a team of four horses. He was only 16 years old and a two furrow plough behind it, actually using the horses to play one of the fields down at max. And here my terrible terrier, he's barking somewhere, he's found something.

(30:16):

We won't know about this until I go and locate him in a minute or two. So I'm just walking out to the edge of the field here and overlooking some of the sandy soil on the farm. And that can be the other reason. Or there's another marl pit here in front of me. So there's two only 50 yards apart. Now if one was perhaps used for making farm buildings, this one was probably used for marlding the soil and that's actually putting clay out on top of the sandy soil. And if you mixed it in, it improved the soil, no end. And of course the marl had chalk in it and lots of light sandy Norfolk soils are quite acidic. So by adding marl to it, you improved the soil in more ways than one - improved its moisture retention as well. But to give you an idea how hard it was, the marl was carted in horse and tumble.

(31:12):

Now horse pulled a little cart known as a tumbrel. You'd have a couple of shafts each side of your working horse, and you would come and shovel the marl into the tumbrel and then you'd take it out to the field and you would have 51 tonne tumbrels to the acre. That was the rough guide to give you an idea how much hard work it was. I can't imagine anybody doing that today. Somehow 50 tumbrel loads all done loaded by hand and unloaded by hand and spread over the land. That started farmers to realise that you could improve the soil from our end of it, but then much later on, and this happened just after I left college in 1970, 1971, the UK government brought out a government white paper called Food from Our Own Resources. - and that sort of was the beginning of the modern agricultural change in the varieties which farmers grew.

(32:18):

And we don't have to think back very far to remember, milk, lakes and wine mountains and grain mountains and all sorts of agricultural produce. And that was partly because of improved knowledge of how to grow the crops with the soil end of it. But not only that, the scientists got involved, particularly one set of scientists in the neighbouring county of Cambridgeshire at the plant research stations. And they sort of developed lots of new agricultural varieties, whether it was root crops or cereals, it didn't matter, but you could tell where they'd come from because many of them had the prefix which denotes they came from Cambridge of Maris in front of it. Many farmers will know some of those prefixes today, my father was one of the first people to grow one of the new Maris varieties. It was called Maris Otter and it was a malting barley and that went up to the Midlands to be malted into the fine beers, which were produced up there at that time.

(33:24):

And then later on wheat had the prefix of Maris as well. And I can very distinctly remember Maris Huntsman. And that replaced the older varieties like Capell and some of the other ones, very tall varieties. And they would produce on a good day, if you were really lucky, two tonnes an acre, that would be a good yield, that would be five tonnes of hectare in modern money. Then the new Huntsman came in and you could, with a little bit of care and attention to your crop husbandry, you could double it. So you can see why farmers started to move to the new varieties. And of course we have Maris Piper potatoes, all the varieties in some way or other was affected by our plant breeders, either grasses from the west coast, from Wales, Aberystwyth with the plant research for grass studies over there. So many of their varieties were improved as well.

(34:24):

You started to lose the old grasses in the pastures and the old cereal varieties, many of them very tall. You've got a wet summer. The whole lot would lodge in the cereals fall flat and made it really difficult to use the binder or in latter days the combine. And so we now use short dwarf varieties of cereals, which hopefully don't lodge unless you put too much fertiliser on. So there we are. A little bit more of the history of the farm will come out in all the different varieties and the way it shaped what you see out in the countryside, wherever you are, the changes are dramatic. They've happened over centuries, but never so as much as they are at the moment. The changes are astonishing. If I go into the local city of Norwich sometimes at the weekend, I'm almost petrified by the amount of people there because very few of them, if I walked up to 'em and say, do you or can you grow your own food? They'd look at me in a misty kind of way apart from telling me to be quiet and say, why would I need to do that? Food comes from shops. Well, I'm standing in the middle of a square mile of Norfolk countryside, wonderful soils and there's hardly a crop growing here. And we'll explore why and how that's happened in one of our next podcasts. So see you then.

(35:56):

Where's that varmint dog?  Oh dear. You're meant to be working. Here goes a rabbit across the track. Where's the rat? I'll do a quiz soon. Where's the rat? I can see him through the nettles. What are you doing in there? Oh, he's coming through brambles, nettles using his nose. There he goes. Cross the track. Absolutely... see what I mean? He cannot see that rabbit, but he's followed the trail. No, I can't do that. You'll find out why he's called rat, one day. I'll tell you.

Matthew Gudgin (36:46):

Thank you Chris, and thank you for listening. If you've any questions for us or photographs you'd like to share, you can stay in touch by emailing us. And the address is chris@countrysidepodcast.co.uk. 
We do also have a postal service of the podcast, so if you know of someone without internet that would really enjoy listening to it, they can leave a message with us by ringing 01603 273899. 
Finally, for now, if you've got a few seconds to spare, you can hit the subscribe button where you are listening and leave a review. We'll be back next week, same time, same place.

Announcer (37:46):

Chris Skinner's Countryside podcast. This is a SOUNDYARD production music by Tom Harris.