Out on the Heath

I grew up loving my rare visits to relatives by driving through the New Forest and Exmoor. These areas are scrublands or heathlands, typically due to poor soil, and safeguarded by cattle grids.  Animals roam wild, ponies, pigs, sheep and cattle,within the gridded areas.  Villages in these pockets of heath enjoy the unsupervised meanderings of ponies on their roadways and village squares. Quaint, yes, and  also tourist attractions. 'Common land' such as this has been common or communal of the people for century's for gathering wood and bracken for fires and grazing their animals.  The poor soil means it has never been used for crops.

I have lived in my area of Sussex for 25 years and recently, to my joy, a local nature reserve of heathland has been fitted with  cattle grids and now stocked with heritage cattle, sheep, new forest ponies, wild pigs (I hope not boar but you never now).  These animals roam around the common and roadways within the gridded area as they do in the New Forest.   Its fabulous seeing this land returned to grazing. On Sunday, as I felt somewhat recovered from my infection, we took the dogs to our Chailey Common as its the time of year that the yellow gorse is in blossom.  Gorse is typical to this heath landscape along with the bracken and ferns.

As you may gather this will be a picture blog for you to enjoy our local heathland.  Sadly we didn't come across grazing livestock this visit but we will go back as its only a 15 minute drive.  In case we did come across great horned cows we kept Luna on a lead after he had had his initial run. 

On my other channel I buy two chairs here  imaginately called The Chairs