Last week I walked over the fields to the village to meet Ben Rodgers, a young man charged with the task of eradicating mink from the River Dore, which runs through the farm. These fierce little predators – descendants of escapees from now-defunct mink farms – are partly responsible for the almost complete absence of coot, moorhen and water voles from the river. They used to be hunted, not very efficiently, by mink hounds – now illegal since the hunting ban – but continued to thrive and eat everything in sight.
The water vole – Ratty of Wind in the Willows – is almost extinct in Britain and has not been seen on the Dore since 1998. As a child, my friend David, the farmer here, used to hear their distinctive little plop, plop each morning when he walked over the bridge to catch the school bus, but hadn’t heard them for years, he says. Now Ratty is making a comeback: by June, Ben Rodgers had successfully trapped the current population of mink on a 40km stretch of the Dore and its tributaries, and a batch of water voles, reared in captivity, were released into the river. His job for the next three years will be to keep the mink away, giving the water voles a chance to build a sustainable population.
“Voles are the pork pie of the river,” he told me, opening a gate into a paddock of woolly Ryland sheep. “Buzzards, herons, foxes all want to eat them. We had a setback in August: mink were spotted here, probably this year’s crop of young from neighbouring rivers, looking for new territory. I hope we’ve caught them all now.” We slid down the bank into the river where he showed me one of the mink rafts he has tethered to the trunk of an alder. Mink are curious by nature, he explained, and no bait is needed: they hop on to the raft, into a wooden cage and a metal gate drops behind them. He checks the traps every day and if there’s a mink it is “humanely dispatched”.
Water vole are shy, secretive creatures – you generally only hear them, or see their prints – but their renewed presence on the river is a marker of a healthy wildlife habitat and one of those invisible little miracles that it makes you happy to think about.
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Then it was out of muddy boots and into a frock for a charity quiz at the Shire Hall to raise money for the breast cancer charity, Haven. Le tout Herefordshire was there with some very posh picnic dinners for each table of ten, and the committee girls in pink sashes busy selling raffle tickets and urging guests to view the alluring items for auction – a week in a ski lodge, a day’s garden design course for two, a catered dinner party for 12, that sort of thing. Our team did rather well in the quiz, thanks to some bright sparks down the other end of the table, but a different lot won in the end, thanks almost entirely to having early on secured the talents of Matthew Engel, the cricket writer and cleverest man in the county, or possibly in England. We consoled ourselves with Santiago pudding – a kind of Spanish Bakewell tart made with membrillo from the Moro cookbook. It was a glittering evening and the ladies gleefully announced we had raised £15,000. “You can’t imagine men organising this sort of thing for prostate cancer, can you?” my friend Anthony said gloomily.
The next day we took ourselves for a walk and came across a flock of sheep grazing a turnip field, which had been a sea of golden barley last time I looked. I find this sort of traditional farming very pleasing – the turnips rest and replenish the soil before the next crop is planted and give the sheep a winter feed at the same time. They had only just started on the green tops and the young turnips were just showing pink beneath.
We gleaned a few and took them home, tiny tender things, and made a delicate soup of them, with leek from the garden: food for free, I thought, with a small gloat of pleasure. Richard Mabey would approve.