The sheep have been gone a few weeks now, so it thought it time to have a walk over there and see if anything had been going on.
First of all, I walked over the part I call the meadow, this is a small section that has wire fences preventing the sheep from grazing there. It has had no land management of any kind for about 18 months and there were two greens in this section. Both these greens have animals living under them now. I found their tunnels, Cosmo put his head right inside and investigated. I don’t know if these holes were big enough for foxes? But I have seen one or two over there.
The second encounter was the most shocking and extremely sad. If you scroll back through this blog you will notice the maps I draw, and on some of those maps I have marked a Horse, living alone in the corner. Well we went to see that horse, see if he wanted any grass or a pat on the cheek? We found him standing in a muddy coat on a concrete pad with steel box section marking out the floor plan of what had been his stable. Three rooms marked out and the horse standing in one of them as if the room was still there. Probably the one away from the door and most cozy. The remains of the stable pushed up against the nearby fence. It had been burnt down and only a pile of charred wood and black burnt posts and beams stacked up in a pile. All that was left was a metal framework marking the layout on the ground. A horse with no home, he did not even walk over to us. I do not know how long ago this happened, but so sad to think of him standing where there used to be shelter in the howling wind and pouring rain, wearing a filthy muddy coat.
The third encounter, real evidence of some kind of building development. Some kind of large plant machinery had driven across the golf course leaving deep furrows in the grass to this particular site? Then taken off the top layer of grass and excavated a large oval shaped patch divided into two halves. These two shallow depressions had filled with water forming two ponds. The other thing was this oval had perimeter outline marked by low fence about 18 inches two foot high, made from black polythene sheeting stapled to regular spaced wooden posts. I would say probably over half this plastic barrier had failed and the sheeting torn away from the posts. I did not stand in the ponds to see how deep they were, but I suspected it would go well over the top of my wellies.
