Caedite Piceas

I said we happy few yomped up our hill for reasons. Those reasons being that The Common was to be scored a second time for its [ecological] quality. Quality here bears only a faint resemblance to the Metaphysics of Quality in a Robert Pirsig / Phaedrus / ZAMM sense. We, The Commoners, have been incentivized over the last 5 years to recognise Value in The Common . . . beyond sending a certified copy of our entry in the Land Registry on to the EU and thereby drawing down whatever subsidy, headage or grant was currently applicable. 

Our hill, you see, is an increasingly rare example of Dry Heath: an intermediate ecological stage where full succession to dark forest is checked by the activities of shepherds and their sheep. Winter on the hill is not a place to fatten sheep: the pickings are slim and the weather can kill even without the drama of a three week blizzard. But during a long Irish Summer, the sheep can chomp through the heather while the in-bye fields are left ungrazed for hay. They also relish tree saplings and so these 'climax' species never get tall enough to shade out the under-storey . . . so Dry Heath.

The score for each Common in the currently favoured scheme for transferring money to farmers has been devised and revised by ecologists employed by The Department of Ag. They have devised an algorithm which identifies Good Things [heather, tormentil, larks] and Bad Things [erosion, bracken, invasive trees]. Things which are useless for sheep-farming, like bogs, might nevertheless score well in the Algorithm. All the features, appropriately weighted, are tallied up into a Score out of 10. Some elements of the scoring can be abstracted from a pass of The Satellite but most of them require boots on the ground. 

Incentives must be seen to have worked (or what's the point?) and that means at least two trips by The Man to each commonage in the country: once for baseline and once after the interventions. Because Ireland is a leaky place, word came down from on high that our Common would be scored on such-a-date and that the score might be improved if a) we cleared trash and b) extirpated any and all Sitka spruce Picea sitchensis which have seeded downwind of the recently felled 40 year old Sitka plantation. That might was carrying a lot of water and only 6 of us heeded the call to do something about it.

The Holy Year Cross (1950) was restored by The Faithful in 2017. For years after, the Cross was surrounded by elements familiar on any building site: a disintegrating bag of builder's sand, several ditto plastic buckets, baulks of timberr and containers for water. When four of us arrived, with trash-bags, at the summit, we found that The Faithful had been, sometime over the last tuthree years, to tidy up the job. We turned away, not too disappointed, intending to cut Sitka on the way downhill to meet the rest of Team Clean as they worked their slash-hooks up and away from the road. 

But 40m from the Cross I stumbled over two fence-posts and a raffle of rebar, electrical-wire and chain-link fence. The only thing for it was to pick it all up and de-Calvary (I was still clearly in ✞ mode) it to the waiting 4x4s. I did not break a leg or sustain significant damage on this potentially dangerous, un-stewarded handicapped cross-county yomp but I didn't pause to cut Sitka either.

The following Saturday, I went back up the hill on me ownio to make a final 🪓Sitka🪓pass. I'd rather hug trees than fell them but there is a place for selective management; like when Kiwi Sean came through our micro-forest in 2022 for some judicious thinning. I delighted to see several [native to Ireland] mountain ash Sorbus aucuparia and even some willow Salix spp getting their heads up through the heather. That's a consequence of running a limited number of sheep on the hill . . . and keeping Bob the Axe on a tight leash.

Post title references: Caedite eos. Novit enim Dominus qui sunt eius. From the chilling instructions by Papal Legate Arnaud Amaury at the massacre of Béziers 22 July 1209.