Episode 2.88 - One-Tooth Charlie and Glacial Water

Send us Fan Mail

On a grey but mild early-September morning at High Ash Farm, Chris Skinner and Matthew Gudgin slip through a gap in the hedge onto Hallback Lane and stand beside a remarkable hollow tree known locally as the Africa Tree. Around 500 years old and pollarded two centuries ago, its great cavity faces them in the almost exact shape of the African continent. The tree becomes the doorway into Chris’s childhood memories of Charlie Graver, a diminutive farm worker who left school at twelve, cycled daily from Stoke Holy Cross with his silent terrier Skippy in the front basket, and once took eight-year-old Chris “fishing” at dusk — assembling a long cane rod fitted with a rabbit snare to lift sleeping pheasants from the trees. Chris recalls the 1950s farm of 31 workers, ten-pound weekly wages paid in cash, straw stacks thatched with hazel broaches, threshing days, chewing tobacco, and a world of horses, binders and unguarded machinery that has now almost vanished.

A sudden roe deer in summer coat flashes across the ride before they climb onto the high northern fields. Here Chris explains why 250 acres were taken out of arable production in 2006: to protect the chalk aquifer a hundred metres beneath them. Rain falling on these grasslands now takes forty to fifty years to reach the glacial water stored in the chalk. From wells on and around the farm, Anglian Water abstracts some 16–20,000 cubic metres a day — water that supplies Norwich and the villages to the south. Historic applications of sewage sludge, pig and chicken manure have left the aquifer high in nitrates, yet the same fields have become a new harvest of bee orchids and pyramidal orchids.

Listener letters bring a photograph of thousands of green shield bugs turning brown for hibernation, a beautiful recording of a male tawny owl beginning its autumn courtship, and a delighted account from early-morning walkers who completed four miles of the farm and met Chris and Rat in person.

This episode is a rich weaving of living memory and hidden landscape — ideal for savouring an old pollarded tree, the vanished skills of a farm worker, and the invisible river of glacial water still flowing beneath High Ash Farm.

https://www.buzzsprout.com/2432378/episodes/19759036-episode-2-88-one-tooth-charlie-and-glacial-water.mp3?download=true

Support the show

Please email any questions for Chris to answer on the podcast to
Chris@highashfarm.com

This podcast is brought to you by High Ash Farm. To support our efforts in creating this content, please consider making a small monthly or one-off donation. Your contributions help us with production costs, and after expenses, every penny goes towards conservation and maintaining free public access at High Ash Farm.
Support us here:
https://donorbox.org/podcast-12
or from the Podcast page here:
Podcast | High Ash Farm