Quantock Hills. An Area of Outstanding Beauty

We met at Crowcombe and headed out into the pitch black hills.  We stopped in Dead Womans Ditch car park as we saw some strange lights moving about up a tree … a bit random we thought!  This turned out to be a family ‘night-walking’ with head torches and the kids were climbing the tree.

We carried on down the Coach Road towards Walford’s Gibbet, wonderfully spooky and atmospheric as our headlights reflected off the twisted trees … Halloween not too far off!

Next stop was in Holford, it is always good to have a Ranger/Police presence in this area at night during the deer rut as there are often stags in the vicinity and we don’t want them shot!  I pulled over, put the windows down and turned off the engine … blackness.  Within a few seconds we heard a deep roar from a stag only a few yards away and then the hoot of an owl directly above us … these are the kind of moments that make night patrols so interesting.

Off again out into the hills … light pollution could be seen across the sea in Wales and towards Bridgwater … but the heart of the hills remained light free apart from a wonderful half moon back lit a thin, high pressure cloud bank … stunning.  We headed south and near Crowcombe Park Gate we found a hill pony caught up in a wire fence.  Dilemma … try and sort this out between us and risk the animal panicking, getting even more entangled and injuring itself or us!  Solution was to contact the pony graziers to deal with it.  Making sure that this was all in order and organised we headed off to patrol the forest.  The gate had not yet been shut in Ramscombe so we travelled through the area to make sure that no-one was going to be locked in … the forest was quiet (apart from a group of deer crossing the track in front of us and a very busy badger!).  We dropped in on a hill farmer near Triscombe Stone to check on the pony situation, which had been quickly resolved, and headed back to Crowcombe pleased that the problem had been sorted out so speedily.

These patrols are most useful, have all-round benefits to the community and maintain the important working relationship between ourselves and the Police.  A bit ‘James Heriott’ compared to policing the city!