Chris Skinner's Countryside Podcasts

High Ash Farm
  • 4.8 (8)
  • Nature
  • Updated Weekly

  Nature, Wildlife and Countryside Living with Chris Skinner from High Ash Farm Chris Skinner, a Norfolk farmer, takes a unique approach to farming, prioritizing biodiversity and wildlife conservation in every practice. Tune in every Sunday morning as Chris, alongside broadcaster Matthew Gudgin, explores topics on nature, wildlife, and rural life. Join them for strolls through High Ash Farm and beyond, spotting wildlife and addressing your queries about the natural world. Email questions for Chris to answer to Chris@highashfarm.com

  1. 4d ago

    Episode 2.95 - Bracken Croziers and Brambling Flocks

    Send us Fan Mail On a breezy but still mild late-October morning at High Ash Farm, Chris Skinner and Matthew Gudgin walk into Cantley Hill Plantation and finally give proper attention to a plant Chris has overlooked for years despite its lifelong link with him — bracken. Covering about five acres on the farm and still shoulder-high and green after the drought on a south-facing gravel slope, the fronds rise from long underground rhizomes that allow it to recover almost overnight, as it did within a fortnight of the Dunwich Heath fire. Chris explains the tripinnate leaf structure, the curled spring croziers once eaten like asparagus (and still popular in Japan), and the plant’s double reputation: toxic enough to cause staggers in cattle and horses and linked to cancers, yet invaluable cover for slow worms, grass snakes, field voles and wintering woodcock whose plumage mirrors its golden-brown litter. Its spread, he notes, was helped by Neolithic forest clearance and later by the shift from cattle and horses to sheep. Barely leaving the truck, they are then treated to a mixed flock of finches on the overwinter wild-bird seed mix. Yellowhammers, greenfinches, linnets and the first brambling of the year are feeding on fat hen and sunflowers only yards away, until a kestrel or the wave of a hand flushes the whole charm into the oak avenue. Chris celebrates the stewardship-funded plots that are doing exactly what they were designed to do. In an evening recording from the duck pond, the resident moorhens are in open war with their own offspring. The two successful broods have left seven birds on a pond that can only support one pair through winter; the parents are now aggressively driving the young away to prevent overcrowding and inbreeding. Chris reflects on the strange light-triggered timing around the shortest day that sets so many birds’ internal clocks, and on the parallel dispersal of young foxes from their natal territories. Listener letters bring a luminous photograph of a pale tussock caterpillar, a query about leeches in a dried Italian pond (prompting a history of the medicinal leech), and strong agreement that snares should long ago have been banned. This episode is an autumn lesson in overlooked plants, mixed flocks and the sometimes harsh necessities of family life — ideal for savouring the resilience of bracken, the colour of a brambling, and the noisy drama of moorhens sorting their winter numbers at High Ash Farm. https://www.buzzsprout.com/2432378/episodes/20007759-episode-2-95-bracken-croziers-and-brambling-flocks.mp3?download=true Support the show Please email any questions for Chris to answer on the podcast to Chris@highashfarm.com This podcast is brought to you by High Ash Farm. To support our efforts in creating this content, please consider making a small monthly or one-off donation. Your contributions help us with production costs, and after expenses, every penny goes towards conservation and maintaining free public access at High Ash Farm. Support us here: https://donorbox.org/podcast-12 or from the Podcast page here: Podcast | High Ash Farm

  2. Oct 17

    Episode 2.94 - Band of Gold and Hedge-Gap Wires

    Send us Fan Mail On a warm, unseasonably sunny mid-October morning at High Ash Farm, Chris Skinner and Matthew Gudgin are stopped in the pickup by a spectacular feeding display beside the farmyard. A charm of around 250 goldfinches — the “clown faces” with their red masks and yellow wing bands — is working the five-acre teasel plot. The birds prise the loose, nutritious seeds from the prickly heads with their specialised beaks, rising briefly to the electricity wires to watch for sparrowhawks before dropping back into the crop or resting in the trees. Chris recalls how these same finches were once caged and trained as “draw waters,” pulling tiny carts of water with their beaks. A short drive to the southern edge of Cantley Hill Plantation reveals flowering ivy still encircling the trunks of larch and Douglas fir. Red admirals in pristine condition are feeding and sunbathing on the last nectar flow of the year. These are the UK-born offspring of spring migrants from southern Europe; whether they will attempt to hibernate on bare oak trunks and in ivy or fly south again remains one of the countryside’s open mysteries. On a boundary hedge the tone turns more serious. Chris produces a free-running snare and explains how such wires are set across traditional animal runs through gaps in old hedges. Though self-locking snares are illegal and the law requires checks every 24 hours, loopholes remain, and Norfolk has ranked high for wildlife persecution in recent years. He makes clear his own disapproval: at High Ash there is no predator control, and nature has been left to find its own balance. In Notre Dame Wood, rabbit excavations have brought up a new and potent plant — thorn apple (Datura stramonium). Its trumpet flowers last only a day or two before forming spiny capsules full of black seeds rich in powerful alkaloids. Once grown commercially for asthma, the plant was also used in “witch’s brews”; its seeds can remain viable in the soil for well over a century. Listener letters bring memories of sheep stripping ivy from hedges, the sad news that the young shepherd has had to sell his flock, practical advice on establishing yellow rattle, oxeye daisy and sainfoin in existing grassland, and an invitation to a talk on the changing fortunes of Britain’s wild birds. This episode is a rich late-autumn mixture of colour, mystery and hard countryside realities — ideal for savouring a charm of goldfinches, the lingering beauty of red admirals, and the quiet power of plants that wait a hundred years to emerge at High Ash Farm. https://www.buzzsprout.com/2432378/episodes/19972263-episode-2-94-band-of-gold-and-hedge-gap-wires.mp3?download=true Support the show Please email any questions for Chris to answer on the podcast to Chris@highashfarm.com This podcast is brought to you by High Ash Farm. To support our efforts in creating this content, please consider making a small monthly or one-off donation. Your contributions help us with production costs, and after expenses, every penny goes towards conservation and maintaining free public access at High Ash Farm. Support us here: https://donorbox.org/podcast-12 or from the Podcast page here: Podcast | High Ash Farm

  3. Oct 10

    Episode 2.93 - Hedera Helix and Vespa Nests

    Send us Fan Mail On a misty mid-October morning at High Ash Farm, with the clay pond in the woodland completely dry and deer tracks printed in the mud, Chris Skinner and Matthew Gudgin turn their attention to ivy — the last great pollen and nectar flow of the year. Thick stems, some four inches across and fifty years old, climb the oaks without rooting into them, clinging instead by tiny sucker discs. Chris explains the plant’s two lives: the pointed juvenile leaves on the trunk, and the smooth lance-shaped flowering shoots that appear after five or six years, opening into yellow drum-heads now busy with bees, wasps, moths and the last butterflies. The green berries will not ripen until December, January and February, when they become vital food for wood pigeons, redwings and other winter thrushes. Evergreen shelter for nesting wrens and hibernating butterflies, and once the pagan symbol of Christmas before holly took its place, ivy answers much of the puzzle of the farm’s rich wildlife. A short drive brings them to a common wasp nest in an old mouse hole beside a busy footpath. Sandy cell-caps litter the entrance as workers ferry nectar and insect prey to the grubs below. Chris follows the wasp year from the hibernating queen in March, through the first golf-ball-sized comb, to the late-season large cells that will produce next year’s queens — while the workers, males and old queen all die. Badgers, impervious to stings, have already dug out many such nests across the farm; Chris recalls the day he and Rat both fled after accidentally treading on one. In Notre Dame Wood the jays are frantic, caching acorns in the long grass, while strange parallel lines on the woodland floor turn out to be sows dragging armfuls of dry leaves and pine needles backwards into a newly enlarged sett — fresh winter bedding gathered while the weather holds. Listener letters bring an offer of unused swallow nest cups, a family visit that produced woodpeckers, a young marsh harrier and clouded yellows, and a thoughtful question about whether jet aircraft contribute to insect and bird decline — answered by Chris’s recording of the delayed “whip” of colliding air masses beneath a Boeing on the Norwich approach. This episode is a late-season celebration of one overlooked climber and the hidden societies beneath our feet — ideal for savouring the last nectar of the year, the busy end of the wasp colony, and the quiet housekeeping of badgers at High Ash Farm. https://www.buzzsprout.com/2432378/episodes/19924444-episode-2-93-hedera-helix-and-vespa-nests.mp3?download=true Support the show Please email any questions for Chris to answer on the podcast to Chris@highashfarm.com This podcast is brought to you by High Ash Farm. To support our efforts in creating this content, please consider making a small monthly or one-off donation. Your contributions help us with production costs, and after expenses, every penny goes towards conservation and maintaining free public access at High Ash Farm. Support us here: https://donorbox.org/podcast-12 or from the Podcast page here: Podcast | High Ash Farm

  4. Oct 3

    Episode 2.92 - Death Watch Frass and Nightshade Berries

    Send us Fan Mail On a bright early-October morning at High Ash Farm, autumn has arrived in earnest at Fox’s Grove. Horse-chestnut leaves are already brown and falling as the corky abscission layer seals each leaf from its stalk, while field maples around the field edges glow scarlet and gold in the low sun. Fallen ash trees, victims of dieback, lie among the leaf litter, and a lawyer’s wig ink cap stands at perfection before it begins to eat itself — dripping black ink that attracts flies and so spreads its spores. Chris then kneels beside a sycamore that has been down only a year. Its trunk is patterned with neat piles of fresh white frass. Blowing the dust away reveals the tiny holes of furniture woodworm (Anobium punctatum) and the slightly larger exits of the death watch beetle. He explains how the adult beetle headbutts its tunnel to make the clicking “death watch” mating call once heard in old houses, and how Harold Lefroy’s treatment of an infestation in Westminster Hall in the 1920s became the product Ento Kill — later registered as Rentokil. A fungus living in the beetles’ guts helps them digest the timber. A great spotted woodpecker works the dead crown of a nearby sycamore in search of the very beetles, and a jay pauses on the track to peck open sweet-chestnut cases before caching the nuts. In an evening recording Chris shares his favourite moment of the day: a bucket of barley drawing some 200 mallard, now emerging from eclipse plumage, into a complete circle around him at the duck pond, joined by a teal, moorhens and waiting feral pigeons. Later, beside a permissive walk, they examine black nightshade in flower and fruit — a close but less deadly cousin of belladonna, whose shiny black berries and reflexed, potato-like flowers still carry powerful alkaloids. Chris recalls how Italian ladies once used deadly nightshade juice to dilate their pupils, and how both nightshade and poppy seed can remain viable for a century or more. Listener letters bring swallows pausing on a Spanish roof during migration, concern about hare coursing, drought-stressed oaks under tree preservation orders, and a pair of beautiful hand-thrown mugs from Alsager Pottery. Chris also offers free teasel seed — 10,000 seeds in a 30-gram pack — to anyone who would like to grow this wildlife plant at home. This episode is a rich autumn miscellany of hidden lives in dead wood and late flowers — ideal for savouring the strange beauty of ink caps and frass, the nightly ritual of the duck pond, and the quiet chemistry of nightshade at High Ash Farm. Support the show Please email any questions for Chris to answer on the podcast to Chris@highashfarm.com This podcast is brought to you by High Ash Farm. To support our efforts in creating this content, please consider making a small monthly or one-off donation. Your contributions help us with production costs, and after expenses, every penny goes towards conservation and maintaining free public access at High Ash Farm. Support us here: https://donorbox.org/podcast-12 or from the Podcast page here: Podcast | High Ash Farm

  5. Sep 26

    Episode 2.91 - Tenancy Act and Norfolk Gem

    Send us Fan Mail On a bright late-September morning at High Ash Farm, Chris Skinner and Matthew Gudgin sit on a homemade oak bench with a panoramic view of Norwich and begin an unusual episode. 452 acres of the farm have been put on the market for around £2.5 million, yet the 1947 Agricultural Holdings Act means Chris — and in time his son Daniel — remain tenants for life. The pair set off to show what a buyer would actually acquire: not just land and cottages, but a working conservation landscape that Chris has spent decades shaping. They examine the soils first. Rabbit burrows on a sunken track reveal a buried beach of glacial sand and powdered chalk left by ice 200–300 metres thick. On Dirty Close the clay has cracked a metre deep after the drought; nearby, a pond once supplied clay for Saxon cremation urns now displayed in Norwich Castle Museum. The holding includes two scheduled ancient monuments — part of the Roman town of Venta Icenorum and an Anglo-Saxon cemetery planted with Scots pine — plus flint tools dating to 5000 BC that Chris once picked up while hoeing sugar beet. Wildlife is thriving. A spring count found more than 70 hares; house sparrows have returned to nest boxes; hedges are heavy with hawthorn and rowan berries; a jay works non-stop caching acorns. Five acres of teasels are ready for seed collecting. Chris contrasts his approach — no predator control, free public access — with other versions of “rewilding.” Listener letters bring thanks for last week’s horse mushrooms, concern about missing waterfowl on the Broads, another giant puffball mistaken for a football, mysterious woolly aphids on American beech, and the quiet after the autumn equinox once the swallows have gone. This episode is both a love letter to a farm and a clear-eyed look at its future — ideal for understanding how a 1947 Act still protects a tenant, why a “Norfolk gem” of wildlife and history is for sale, and how the landscape beneath High Ash Farm has been shaped by ice, Romans, Saxons and one determined farmer. https://www.buzzsprout.com/2432378/episodes/19863805-episode-2-91-tenancy-act-and-norfolk-gem.mp3?download=true Support the show Please email any questions for Chris to answer on the podcast to Chris@highashfarm.com This podcast is brought to you by High Ash Farm. To support our efforts in creating this content, please consider making a small monthly or one-off donation. Your contributions help us with production costs, and after expenses, every penny goes towards conservation and maintaining free public access at High Ash Farm. Support us here: https://donorbox.org/podcast-12 or from the Podcast page here: Podcast | High Ash Farm

  6. Sep 19

    Episode 2.90 - Fairy Rings and Giant Puffballs

    Send us Fan Mail On a fine mizzling mid-September morning at High Ash Farm, Chris Skinner and Matthew Gudgin begin in the farmyard and notice that September has lived up to its name as the changeling month. The swallows have vanished almost overnight — more than a hundred young sent south after a successful season — while a handsome young cockerel struts among the nest boxes and a robin still sings. The pair then set out on a fungal foray. At the base of an oak they find beefsteak fungus, a rich red bracket that “bleeds” when scratched. Chris explains how cabinet-makers once rubbed its juice onto other oaks so the heartwood would stain a prized deep orange-brown. Nearby, a velvety Ganoderma bracket is already shedding spores. In the horse paddocks they test field mushrooms by peeling, smell and gill colour, then walk fairy rings — some perhaps three or four hundred years old — where a single spore has spread an inch a year, burning the grass in a circle and releasing nitrogen that darkens the turf. Inside another ring they gather horse mushrooms, identified by their aniseed scent, peeling cap and lack of yellow staining. On the Anglo-Saxon cemetery field in Caister Park a giant puffball has appeared in two or three days, still snow-white and the size of a small football. Last year’s dried specimens release clouds of spores that the wind can carry as far as the Continent. Along a damp lane, water mint has flowered again after the council mowed the verge, filling the ditch with its scent for a late buff-tailed bumblebee. Listener letters bring nightingales singing beside a Berlin beer garden, a visit from listeners who travelled from Western Australia, the first fieldfares of autumn, a polecat-ferret on camera in South Wales, and news of hirundine flocks and pink-footed geese passing Spurn Point. This episode is a rich harvest of autumn’s hidden harvest — ideal for savouring the strange beauty of fungi, the sudden switch from swallows to fieldfares, and the simple pleasure of gathering a safe supper from the fields of High Ash Farm. https://www.buzzsprout.com/2432378/episodes/19826686-episode-2-90-fairy-rings-and-giant-puffballs.mp3?download=true Support the show Please email any questions for Chris to answer on the podcast to Chris@highashfarm.com This podcast is brought to you by High Ash Farm. To support our efforts in creating this content, please consider making a small monthly or one-off donation. Your contributions help us with production costs, and after expenses, every penny goes towards conservation and maintaining free public access at High Ash Farm. Support us here: https://donorbox.org/podcast-12 or from the Podcast page here: Podcast | High Ash Farm

  7. Sep 12

    Episode 2.89 - Ivy Bees and Falling Ash

    Send us Fan Mail On a beautiful early-autumn morning at High Ash Farm, after another 13 millimetres of welcome rain has turned the fields verdant once more, Chris Skinner and Matthew Gudgin begin at the farmyard entrance. A robin is singing again after its midsummer silence, rooks and jackdaws corkscrew down from the sky in display flight while a peregrine circles high above, and late swallows are still feeding young in the barn. On the flowering ivy they discover a new arrival: ivy bees (Colletes hederae), first recorded in Britain in 2001. These late-season solitary bees, with their orange thoraxes and wasp-like stripes, are gathering the last major nectar flow of the year. A short drive to Greensides Loke reveals their nesting site — a west-facing sandy bank riddled with rabbit holes and thousands of tiny burrows. Females excavate straw-width tunnels half a metre into the soil, line them with saliva, and provision them with pollen and nectar before sealing them for the winter. Males hover at the entrances and pile onto females in frantic mating clusters. Though solitary, they nest in dense congregations wherever the habitat is right. In Fox’s Grove the pair turn to fungi and trees. Chicken of the woods (sulphur polypore) glows on a sweet chestnut, while a 250-year-old ash — one of the farm’s giants — stands in its last hours. Ash dieback has rotted its roots to pulp; a trail camera is trained on the trunk, ready to capture the moment it falls. Chris reflects on the 1,500 ash saplings that died young, the black staining of Chalara, and the Norse idea of ash as the tree of life. Once down, the timber will feed beetles, woodworm and more fungi, returning at last to the rich leaf-mould of the woodland floor. Listener letters bring a perfect comma butterfly displaying the white mark that gives it its name, recordings of a blackcap and a nightingale, and a precise reminder of the Game Act 1831.This episode is a poignant celebration of autumn’s dual nature — new life arriving with the ivy bees, and an ancient giant preparing to fall — ideal for savouring late pollinators, the first fungi of the season, and the quiet power of even the smallest organisms at High Ash Farm. https://www.buzzsprout.com/2432378/episodes/19791131-episode-2-89-ivy-bees-and-falling-ash.mp3?download=true Support the show Please email any questions for Chris to answer on the podcast to Chris@highashfarm.com This podcast is brought to you by High Ash Farm. To support our efforts in creating this content, please consider making a small monthly or one-off donation. Your contributions help us with production costs, and after expenses, every penny goes towards conservation and maintaining free public access at High Ash Farm. Support us here: https://donorbox.org/podcast-12 or from the Podcast page here: Podcast | High Ash Farm

  8. Sep 5

    Episode 2.88 - One-Tooth Charlie and Glacial Water

    Send us Fan Mail On a grey but mild early-September morning at High Ash Farm, Chris Skinner and Matthew Gudgin slip through a gap in the hedge onto Hallback Lane and stand beside a remarkable hollow tree known locally as the Africa Tree. Around 500 years old and pollarded two centuries ago, its great cavity faces them in the almost exact shape of the African continent. The tree becomes the doorway into Chris’s childhood memories of Charlie Graver, a diminutive farm worker who left school at twelve, cycled daily from Stoke Holy Cross with his silent terrier Skippy in the front basket, and once took eight-year-old Chris “fishing” at dusk — assembling a long cane rod fitted with a rabbit snare to lift sleeping pheasants from the trees. Chris recalls the 1950s farm of 31 workers, ten-pound weekly wages paid in cash, straw stacks thatched with hazel broaches, threshing days, chewing tobacco, and a world of horses, binders and unguarded machinery that has now almost vanished. A sudden roe deer in summer coat flashes across the ride before they climb onto the high northern fields. Here Chris explains why 250 acres were taken out of arable production in 2006: to protect the chalk aquifer a hundred metres beneath them. Rain falling on these grasslands now takes forty to fifty years to reach the glacial water stored in the chalk. From wells on and around the farm, Anglian Water abstracts some 16–20,000 cubic metres a day — water that supplies Norwich and the villages to the south. Historic applications of sewage sludge, pig and chicken manure have left the aquifer high in nitrates, yet the same fields have become a new harvest of bee orchids and pyramidal orchids. Listener letters bring a photograph of thousands of green shield bugs turning brown for hibernation, a beautiful recording of a male tawny owl beginning its autumn courtship, and a delighted account from early-morning walkers who completed four miles of the farm and met Chris and Rat in person. This episode is a rich weaving of living memory and hidden landscape — ideal for savouring an old pollarded tree, the vanished skills of a farm worker, and the invisible river of glacial water still flowing beneath High Ash Farm. https://www.buzzsprout.com/2432378/episodes/19759036-episode-2-88-one-tooth-charlie-and-glacial-water.mp3?download=true Support the show Please email any questions for Chris to answer on the podcast to Chris@highashfarm.com This podcast is brought to you by High Ash Farm. To support our efforts in creating this content, please consider making a small monthly or one-off donation. Your contributions help us with production costs, and after expenses, every penny goes towards conservation and maintaining free public access at High Ash Farm. Support us here: https://donorbox.org/podcast-12 or from the Podcast page here: Podcast | High Ash Farm

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4.8
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  Nature, Wildlife and Countryside Living with Chris Skinner from High Ash Farm Chris Skinner, a Norfolk farmer, takes a unique approach to farming, prioritizing biodiversity and wildlife conservation in every practice. Tune in every Sunday morning as Chris, alongside broadcaster Matthew Gudgin, explores topics on nature, wildlife, and rural life. Join them for strolls through High Ash Farm and beyond, spotting wildlife and addressing your queries about the natural world. Email questions for Chris to answer to Chris@highashfarm.com

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