Fencing…

This is going to be a recurring topic, given the state of the fencing at Cairnorchies!

I had a spot of independent thought and action from Dancer at bringing in time yesterday, so today I rigged up a deflection device to steer loose horses away from the road; it’s a simple thing, just a length of electric fence wire (unconnected) tied around a drainpipe on the corner of the stable and stretched to a spring gate that hooks onto the field boundary fence near the gateway there. It steers horses towards the stable entrance rather than the road, anyway!

I’ve added another spring gate between there and the paddock gate itself, in case I have to let a horse out of the paddock but don’t want them getting ahead of me to far – effectively there’s now an extra small paddock between the main grazing and the yard.

Tomorrow we’re going to double the size of the grazing paddock – I’ve removed the old tatty electric wire from the road side boundary fence and run a nice visible new white wire through the insulators, so tomorrow morning we need to dismantle the internal boundary fence between Abe’s small paddock and Poppy’s bigger one, the stakes from which I can then use to complete the new fence line. It should give the three of them about an acre to scamper about in, which will keep them in cavorting space for a while.

I’ve also made a start on dismantling the gate into the north paddock, which is a fabulous hodge-podge of every technique of fence-bodging known to the fertile imagination of the smallholder – admittedly, I’ve used them all myself in the past, but never all at once on the same gate! I’ve managed to detach the 8-foot-high security fence panel from the back of the field gate, and extracted the two shopping baskets and several odd pieces of wire grid used to fill in bits, but I’m still working on the chicken wire.

Finally, I got round at last to uprooting enough of the garden fence to realign it and hook it up to the field fence, so I’ll be able to confine the geese at that end of the garden. I still need to finish off the other end and patch a couple of holes in the boundary fence, but we’re getting there.

After that, I took the afternoon off to go and visit George. He’s fine and will be coming home on the 1st March!