Shoddy time at Salehurst

Never mind the birds – I find I spend more and more time on RXbirdwalks trying to imagine what the countryside might have looked like in the past. What would the Rother have looked like in the middle ages when it was still wide and untamed, yet navigable? It’s hard to conjure up such a vision from the present flat green fields, the river now a narrow stream hidden down a deeply scored gully, the sweeping valley vista blocked by ranks of poplars.

Or much more recently when the valley floor was populated with hops – so many, to judge from the ubiquitous oasts, round or square, brick or sandstone.

I had a very good primary education in the 1950s, in a brand-new, light and spacious Modernist school with humane and humorous teachers, from whom I learnt about all kinds of things including hop-farming, in those days in a headlong decline. That’s how I’d heard about shoddy. When, this morning, we were looking for birds in a Salehurst hop-garden I discovered I was the only one who knew what it was – the dregs of minced-up woollen rags laid down with other noisome yet nutritious waste as fertilizer for the hops. You can read a whole page about it here.

In Googling shoddy I also found a nice memoir from Mr L P Haynes of Bodiam Hop Farms which included this:

Hop-growers have found that hops pay for feeding and thousands of tons of crushed refuse from London boroughs have been composted by Kent growers. Many hop-growers have lost money in fattening cattle in order to feed the hops well on the resulting dung. Shoddy waste from Yorkshire mills, turkey feathers from Ireland, guano, slag, potash and phosphates in various forms, meat and bone meal, hair, hare and rabbit flick and skins cut up, fish heads and guts from fishing ports are all useful. These are now dried, ground and delivered in bags as “manure,” but between 1920 and 1939 they were delivered in all their natural condition.

Some recent comments on Trip Advisor used this word, seemingly unaware of its origins, to describe aspects of services at the Hop Farm, Paddock Wood.

Enough of hopping, what about birds? House Sparrows were hopping, chattering too in healthy numbers at every farm and hamlet we passed. Chaffinches were hopping too beneath the hop-poles, up which a GS Woodpecker was shinning, and perching on the wires. No sign of the Yellowhammers that nest here, however. Maybe they’re busy in game-cover.

No noisy geese on the Park Farm lake, but a pair of Mute Swans, 5 Little Grebes, a Coot, a few Moorhens, 32 slightly suspicious Mallards and 2 Gadwall. Across the lane, the rushy field (where previously, in summer, we’d found nesting Reed Buntings, Reed Warblers and Lapwings) were just a couple of Snipe, but overhead 4 Buzzards and a Kestrel were soaring. (A fifth Buzzard had been over the village.)

Phantasmagoric forms in grown-out hedges along sinuous, ancient wood-banks now engulfed in conifer plantations.

In Wellhead Wood, where wildlife-friendly management has seen rides & glades widened, the formerly numerous Blue & Great Tits switched abruptly to Coal Tits and there were a few Goldcrests but no sign of the Crossbills which had been present a few weeks ago.

Many noisy small birds had been lured into the island of gardens, stables and tall hedges around Robertsbridge Abbey by a largesse of peanuts. Most conspicuous were twittering bands of Goldfinches (c40) and Siskins (c50), large groups for a winter in which they seem scarce elsewhere.

Following a jolly lunch in the popular Salehurst Halt, we spent a few minutes at Feathers, sizing up the birdfood, feeders, binoculars etc before crossing the road to the Nature Area where battalions of Blue Tits had been attracted to large-scale deployments of seeds, this in turn attracting a lightning visit from a male Sparrowhawk.

(Trivia Time contd: tawdry – [C16 tawdry lace, shortened and altered from Seynt Audries lace, finery sold at the fair of St Audrey (Etheldrida), 7th-century queen of Northumbria and patron saint of Ely, Cambridgeshire])