E
very autumn we
are treated to the
distressing spectacle
of people, in places
like Worcester and
Doncaster, hauling
soggy three-piece
suites and ruined
fridge freezers from
their flooded houses.
And every year
farmers are blamed by the
likes of the eco-journalist
George Monbiot for not
managing the soil properly.
That’s why, a couple of years
ago, I hired a very large digger
and spent a week roaring about
in it, making dams and boggy
places. My thinking was simple.
If I could hold the rainfall up
here, high in the Cotswold
Hills, it wouldn’t cascade down
into the local village and ruineveryone’s red trousers. Plus,
I’d have some nice ponds.
And far away in Norfolk an
84-year-old farmer called Paul
Rackham plainly thought much
the same thing. So he cleared
away all the weeds and brambles
on the banks of the Little
Ouse, a small river that runs
through his land. This caused
the water flow to slow down and
created a lovely spot for swans
to come and live.
And because of this his
company has been fined
£17,000, ordered to pay £49,000
in costs and forced to spend
£400,000 doing remedial
work. Welcome to the world of
farming. You try to do your best
and someone with a clipboard
and adenoids sends you a bill
for nearly half a mill.
It seems that a governmentspy visited Rackham’s farm to
take water samples. He noticed
the river was deeper than usual
and, possibly because he
doesn’t have deep-water
training, he had to abandon his
sampling. A month later more
spies visited the area to see why
the water was deeper and found
the banks had been tidied up
and raised.
Yet more spies arrived in
a fleet of hired Vauxhalls and
somehow, in the new banks,
they found evidence that water
voles had been living there.
In my experience this is an
inexact science as water vole
holes look much like any other
sort of hole. But, anyway, they
knew a water vole community
had been destroyed along
with a number of unnamed
invertebrates and shrimps. SoFA R M I N G●Jeremy Clarkson
If the nimbys win, my plan to save them
from drowning will be dead in the water