When we arrived here fifteen years ago, the ditch was a festoon of bramble, the remains of a hedge with more teeth missing than in place and a huge crack willow with its feet in the wet. The cattle were allowed to come to the water on this side in the lower sections and on the side of The Tump up at the top. A simple move of taking a twisted strand of rusted barbed wire across the ditch to divide the two worlds at the willow. Where the cattle came to the water there were muddied ruts so deep that you were likely to lose your boots and without them there was certainly no crossing, rain or shine.

It took a couple of winter’s repair work to strim back the bramble and carefully wind up the barbed wire and pull the motley assortment of fence posts from the mud. The surviving hawthorns, flailed to the height of the barbed wire, were carefully thinned to remove the worst of their wounded limbs and allowed to grow away. The hazels, which had rebranched into ugly knuckles at the height of the flail, were coppiced to the base and allowed to regenerate. The silvery line of water was thus revealed in the fold between the two fields. Dipping four times over natural tufa falls, diving into the deep shade of the crack willow in the middle and then again where the water meets the stream that runs in the wood at the bottom.