Get off my land.

I was napping, sorry digging, on the plot the other day, when I was startled by the sound of a low flying aircraft overhead. It was that low in fact, it had me running for cover thinking I was in bloody Pearl Harbour!

Luckily I had a brown paper bag in the shed, and after I’d stopped hyperventilating I realised it was on a training run, testing the radar at nearby Staxton Wold RAF Station which is just to the South of us. Night and day these people scan the skies over the North Sea, protecting our territory from those nasty Russians. Don’t they know that they can come over here on ferries now, with visas.

As it happens, just to the North of our allotments (See above photo) I can see an archaeological site where people were doing a similar thing, 4000 years ago. Here there are ancestral burial mounds and massive boundary earthworks, that were meant to send out a clear message to any newcomers, that this was their territory, “Keep Off”.

Now when we first got these plots they were marked out just with pegs by the council, and the first thing everyone did was to put up a fence around theirs, and woe betide anyone who tried to pinch a bit from someone else.

Of course it was to keep those damn rabbits out, wasn’t it ? Well no, I suspect there was a little more going on than that. It was that same vital urge to claim their territory, that’s been going on since those first farmers settled this land.

So I sat back down in my little bit of territory, keeping a wary eye out for any more suicidal kamikaze pilots, and thought, “nowt’s changed much as it”.