The start of the new year brought a major change of circumstances and opportunity on the farm. A piece of land came up for sale across the boundary and, after a terrific amount of wrangling back and forth, I was finally able to buy it.
In agricultural terms, it’s no great powerhouse of productivity. One half of the 60-acre patch is a knuckle of hard granite and the remains of an old Victorian quarry. The other half is a wet meadow next to a heavily drained and badly degraded watercourse, which is more like a canal than a river. It doesn’t look like much, but three pairs of curlew come to breed there every year and I have been looking enviously at this place for a long time.
These curlew are
