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On a bright late-September morning at High Ash Farm, Chris Skinner and Matthew Gudgin sit on a homemade oak bench with a panoramic view of Norwich and begin an unusual episode. 452 acres of the farm have been put on the market for around £2.5 million, yet the 1947 Agricultural Holdings Act means Chris — and in time his son Daniel — remain tenants for life. The pair set off to show what a buyer would actually acquire: not just land and cottages, but a working conservation landscape that Chris has spent decades shaping.
They examine the soils first. Rabbit burrows on a sunken track reveal a buried beach of glacial sand and powdered chalk left by ice 200–300 metres thick. On Dirty Close the clay has cracked a metre deep after the drought; nearby, a pond once supplied clay for Saxon cremation urns now displayed in Norwich Castle Museum. The holding includes two scheduled ancient monuments — part of the Roman town of Venta Icenorum and an Anglo-Saxon cemetery planted with Scots pine — plus flint tools dating to 5000 BC that Chris once picked up while hoeing sugar beet.
Wildlife is thriving. A spring count found more than 70 hares; house sparrows have returned to nest boxes; hedges are heavy with hawthorn and rowan berries; a jay works non-stop caching acorns. Five acres of teasels are ready for seed collecting. Chris contrasts his approach — no predator control, free public access — with other versions of “rewilding.”
Listener letters bring thanks for last week’s horse mushrooms, concern about missing waterfowl on the Broads, another giant puffball mistaken for a football, mysterious woolly aphids on American beech, and the quiet after the autumn equinox once the swallows have gone.
This episode is both a love letter to a farm and a clear-eyed look at its future — ideal for understanding how a 1947 Act still protects a tenant, why a “Norfolk gem” of wildlife and history is for sale, and how the landscape beneath High Ash Farm has been shaped by ice, Romans, Saxons and one determined farmer.
https://www.buzzsprout.com/2432378/episodes/19863805-episode-2-91-tenancy-act-and-norfolk-gem.mp3?download=true
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Chris@highashfarm.com
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