New Forest Notes: The animal challenges facing Forest’s new waste system
New Forest rubbish
Last month marked 35 years since I started to write New Forest Notes and as I sat through several hours during which the May meeting of the verderers struggled with one public pressure issue after another, I reflected on how the court’s work has changed over the years.
Even in 1990 it was becoming difficult to cope with the demands being made on the Forest and at that time the national park, with its attendant intensified pressures for more recreation, was still just a political objective. It did not become a fact until more than a decade later. If things were not easy in 1990, we were still able to devote more time to the original purposes of the court. Today, business seems more like trying to save a sinking ship than steering a straight and sensible course. May’s dominant theme was rubbish.
Firstly, there was the management of quantities of refuse created by the commercial camping sites which operate on the common land across the Forest. For years the sites have been disfigured by huge plastic rubbish containers which are supposed to be removed at the end of the camping season and which usually are – sometimes after a bit of pressure on the camp operators.
Now, under new Defra regulations, the site managers say they are compelled to comply with new waste management regulations requiring four different types of bin instead of the original one. All will presumably be of different colours. Numerous bin compounds will be required, at least on the larger sites and perhaps worst of all will be the provision of waste food bins. The surroundings of these will, of course, be a prime target for rats, dogs and foxes, but we are assured they will be firmly chained down and fitted with secure lids.
What the Defra regulations (if correctly interpreted) presumably ignore is the appalling impact of such facilities upon the landscape and special circumstances of the New Forest. What may be acceptable on urban fringe campsites could be intolerable in an area where large herbivores, especially pigs, roam freely. Many are highly experienced in smashing their way into the best designed and maintained receptacles. Moreover, the greater the security of the bins, the less inclined the visitors will be to access and use them. Disposal in the nearest bush will be an easier option.
It is, of course, illegal to feed waste food to pigs and it is undesirable to allow access to it by ponies and cattle. The latter are at risk (if usually a low one) of contracting foot-and-mouth disease via infected meat, at times like the present when there is an outbreak in Europe.
Altogether, this is a rather dreadful situation. When added to the other problems created by the camps – unauthorised gravel extensions of hardstanding, additional notices, wear, livestock petting and increasingly violent interactions between visitors and stock – I can see no sensible solution but the relocation of these facilities to private enclosed land where they can be highly equipped and safely managed. The alternative of fencing-in large areas of open Forest pasture is at best unattractive and is in any case unacceptable to ecological interests. As to the woodland sites, 25 years ago three of them (Longbeech, Denny and Hollands Wood) were listed by English Nature as high priority for closure, because of the damage they were causing. Nothing whatever has been done. They remain too attractive an asset for a cash-hungry Forestry England and its commercial lessee.
As a final word on this subject, I wonder if the woods and heaths of the Forest are really an appropriate place for the hiring-out of new luxury tents such as the site operators now promise on half their estate across the south of the Forest. The old slogan of ‘Forest first’ seems to have been replaced by ‘Money before Forest’.
If management of visitors’ rubbish, at least in the camps, is a soluble problem, the same cannot be said of the waste produced and stored by householders. The New Forest District Council’s plans for general and non-food waste disposal and recycling may be an inevitable part of modern life, but it is in the food waste disposal that the challenge of the campsites is matched and probably exceeded.
With collections from the no doubt very smelly receptacles along verges across the entire Forest, our expert raiders (particularly donkey teams) are in for a bonanza. The council’s regulations say that the containers will be “secure”, whatever that means, and should be “set out at the edge or curtilage of the property, where it meets the public highway”. That too is most unclear.
We are told that in some circumstances the council may request that containers are left behind the householder’s gate. That should be an absolute requirement in all cases and not an occasional request. I imagine that no councillor has studied the activities of donkey raiders in villages like mine, where culprits will remove sealed dry recycling bags from a covered dustbin and tear the bag open in the hope of finding some wrongly segregated edible morsel. We are in for a lot of trouble unless the council revises its rules and collects from inside fenced gardens.
The new clerk to the verderers
Last month the Verderers’ Court appointed a new clerk following the retirement of the long-serving Sue Westwood at the end of 2024. Justine Bayley will be only the seventh permanent holder of the office since the court was established in 1877. Her appointment follows a now well-established pattern of choosing a lady as the holder of this position. That is in contrast to the all-male clerks between 1877 and 1975. It also demonstrates continuity in that Ms Bayley joined the verderers’ staff in 2014 as Sue Westwood’s assistant. In the decade since she will have handled or observed every challenge likely to be thrown at her in the new job. The verderers will be spared the onerous task of educating a raw recruit for a position which must be unique in public administration. She describes joining the verderers as “her dream job”, reflecting as it did her love of the Forest and of horses.
Justine came to the court following an early career in the hospitality industry, followed by a spell in finance. Originally from Southampton, she has lived around the Forest ever since, riding regularly from New Park at Brockenhurst and until recently having her own horse.
The reduced staffing levels in the office resulting from the upheavals and financial constraints of recent years are not confined to the verderers’ administration and I hope will be only temporary, but in the meantime the day-to-day business of the court will be in good hands.
A sad incident in Burley’s past
I was introduced early in life to one of the sadder purposes for which the Forest is used. As a schoolboy I found a suicide in a quiet location adjoining Highland Water Inclosure and my attendance at the subsequent Coroners’ Court was my first introduction to the legal system. How many have died in the Forest in similar circumstances since then, I do not like to think.
The passage of time seems in some way to lessen the harshness of such activity and once well beyond human memory it can become the subject of historical enquiry. So it is at Burley Moor, to the east of that village, near to Oakley Inclosure. The Moor is a mixture of little hills and wet valleys crossed by occasional pony paths, but it still remains reasonably quiet and certainly not a prime tourist target. It is not burdened with car parks or camps.
On the opposite side of the Moor to Burley village is a prominent sandy hill upon which stands a single (now dead) larch tree of considerable age. If you look on the Ordnance Survey maps, the hill is not named, but as always in matters of Burley local history, the authority on the subject is Felicite Hardcastle’s Records of Burley. In that book we are told that the place is called Collins Grave.
In the 1951 first edition of her book (which treasure I received from the author as a wedding present 17 years after publication), the site is described, but not illustrated. The same description appears in the 1987 edition of the book, published just before the author’s death. Here there is added an old, undated, photograph showing three trees. Only one skeleton remains today as the lone larch tree shown in the photograph here. A small hawthorn tree provided by nature will be all that replaces it.
Miss Hardcastle writes that a man named Collins hanged himself from a tree on the hill, probably between 1830 and 1850, but she knew nothing more. The tree used must certainly have been of an earlier generation than the present one. Perhaps a later ornamental planting took place to continue the memory of what happened. She suggests that actual burial of the unfortunate man at the site was unlikely and that the “grave” element of the name was more probably related to the Bronze Age round barrow which also surmounts the hill. This is of an unusual type (if not unique) in the Forest comprising a standard bowl barrow with ditch, but also an external bank.
Unfortunately, it has been damaged by a series of quarry pits on the eastern crest of the hill. Their date and purpose is unknown, but there are many such pits around Burley seeking ironstone for use in building. The material seems to have been prized by cottagers. Unlike bricks, for which payment had to be made, the stone probably involved no cost beyond the labour of digging it out.
The details of the Collins tragedy may have been lost, but memory of it lives on in this beautiful quiet location, with the hill sprinkled with self-sown azalea flowers in spring and with flashes of white cotton grass in patches on its wetter slopes. Perhaps today when so many people have subscriptions to archive copies of local newspapers, more light could be thrown on this obscure piece of village history.
