We need a longish spell of warm and dry weather. As I was unsure of the weather when I made the hay, I left a small paddock at the end of the valley uncut. It is only just over an acre, completely surrounded by woods except for the paths that lead in and out. Because the woods surround it, it doesn’t get a lot of sun, the grass is always later than the rest of the farm. There is still a good bit of seed on it, even at this time of year it will make very good hay. I would normally not have bothered to try to make hay from it this late, because of being unsure with the weather, but the price hay is fetching at the moment, it would be daft not to make hay from it. We sold fifty bales of the hay that we made a week or so back, that paid for nearly the whole cost of all the hay that we made. The advert we placed to sell it, introduced people who needed hay in small bales. As long as the weather stays good it will be sold as soon as it is made.
The paddock is one of my favorite spots on the farm. Unless the owner of the farm next door is trespassing whilst out shooting, it is an extremely quite spot. I will tell you about him soon. The only thing that you can hear is the Birds singing and occasionally the Steam Trains whistles when the wind is blowing from the direction of the steam railway, that is about a mile away. There is a very old large Ash tree in the middle of the paddock, that probably makes it as attractive to me as it does. Since I have lived at Denbury the tree has lost a couple of large limbs in the wind. It is a shame, although you wouldn’t notice it if you saw the tree for the first time as it is, I can see that it has lost a fair amount of shape. I remember the first limb that it lost whilst I was here. To get to the paddock that the tree is in, you walk through the field where the valley camera is located. In the very far left hand side the path narrows, that then leads into the paddock. Not until you nearly reach the paddock can you see the Ash tree.
On one particular morning after an extremely windy night I just noticed a wall of green in front of me as I entered the paddock, so much that it looked as if the whole tree had been blown over. My heart dropped into my stomach. It took me a good ten minutes to make my way through a wall of leaves to find that a very large limb that faced towards the front of the tree, had been blown off. I wasn’t that much relieved, I was still pretty devastated that so much damage had been done to the tree on my watch at Denbury, especially as it looked as if the tree had never had such major damage in its many decades or even hundreds of years of its life. As the limb broke of from the front of the tree as you faced it from the path, we soon got use to it. Unfortunately a couple of years later another very large limb on the left hand side of the tree was blown off in a storm.
Another nice part of the paddock is that the stream runs through it by the side of the wood, There is a very small flat area by the side of the stream that is obviously used by animals to drink at. I call it the beach, it is a great place for children to play, paddle and catch the odd tiddler. Now that I have written about it, it is not one of my favorite places, it is my favorite.