Jeremy Clarkson is not personally responsible for what happened to our new gravel drive. Legally, I should probably make that clear at the beginning.
He was, however, involved in the chain of events.
After watching Clarkson explain why he had left his fields uncut to protect the bird life, I decided that we should do the same at Martins Farm.
This seemed like excellent countryside stewardship. It was good for nature, suited the character of the High Weald and, most attractively, required me to do absolutely nothing.
Clarkson also recommended the Merlin bird app, for which I must genuinely thank him. It is a genius little app. We now use it to identify the birds and calls around the farm, and it is astonishing how many species reveal themselves once you begin listening properly—even if Winston continues to classify them simply as either worth investigating or not worth getting up for.
So I waited.
The birds benefited, I like to think. The rain, meanwhile, disappeared completely.
Week after week passed without any meaningful water falling from the East Sussex sky. The grass grew tall, dried out and eventually reached the point where responsible delayed mowing began to look rather like neglect with an ecological press release attached.
I decided I would cut a couple of the fields.
The plan was simple. I would spend a pleasant afternoon outdoors, make some progress, acquire a light tan and probably be bitten repeatedly by horseflies. There would be fresh air, honest work and the quiet satisfaction of managing one’s own land.
It is important at this stage to explain the tractor.
Calling it a tractor is generous. It is really a ride-on mower that has attended one agricultural seminar. It is slightly more substantial than something you might use on a large lawn, but it is certainly not a Lamborghini.
Unfortunately, I may have treated it as though it were.
For a while, we were going magnificently. The little tractor pulled the flail mower through the dry grass, chopping everything behind it and leaving what appeared, through the dust, to be a respectably managed field.
The flail was also throwing enormous quantities of powdered grass, seed and earth into the air. Within minutes, I was less a country gentleman than a mobile dust filter.
I was choking, my eyes were watering and most of East Sussex appeared to have entered my nose. What I needed was one of those Covid-style masks we all once kept in every coat pocket.
What I had was optimism.
The tan never really materialised. The horseflies showed considerably better project delivery.
Then I realised my phone was missing.
The tractor has a lock box specifically intended to hold a phone securely while mowing. I had not put my phone in it. Instead, I had apparently placed it somewhere from which it could leap unnoticed into several acres of long, exceptionally dry grass.
This was not ideal.
Find My iPhone is reassuring technology until the possible search area can be described as “somewhere I have just driven over with a flail mower.”
I began running around the field, following the location signal and praying that I had not already dry-mulched my phone. Every patch of freshly cut grass seemed capable of containing several thousand pounds’ worth of finely distributed Apple components.
The signal suggested it was nearby. Then farther away. Then behind me.
Eventually, astonishingly, I found the phone intact.
This would have been a sensible moment to stop.
Naturally, I carried on.
The remaining mowing passed without further incident, and I began making my way towards the yard—dusty, bitten and feeling moderately pleased with myself. The fields were cut, the wildlife had been given its season and the telephone had survived.
Then the tractor stopped.
Completely.
One moment it was a small agricultural vehicle. The next it was garden furniture.
I tried another gear. Nothing. I tried reverse. Nothing. I returned to the original gear in case it had changed its mind.
It had not.
I tried everything available to a person with no mechanical expertise: changing gears repeatedly, switching things off and on, looking underneath it and staring at the controls with increasing disappointment.
Eventually, I discovered the problem.
One of the hydraulic arms had unscrewed itself.
I do not know whether I had hit something in the field, whether the vibration had gradually worked it loose or whether the tractor had simply decided that it had participated enough for one afternoon.
It had not snapped or exploded. It had calmly unscrewed—a degree of initiative I had not expected from any part of the machine.
The flail was still attached, but the loose arm meant it was no longer being held level.
The obvious response was to raise it clear of the ground.
When I tried, the flail dug itself in and the entire tractor listed alarmingly to the right. Raising the equipment made matters worse: the higher I attempted to lift it, the more uneven the whole arrangement became.
Counterintuitively, the tractor moved better when I lowered the flail.
Lowering it allowed the weight to sit more evenly behind the tractor and stopped the machine leaning so dramatically. This was mechanically helpful but extremely unfortunate for the newly installed gravel drive lying between me and the garage.
The tractor would move only when the flail was low enough to achieve the maximum possible contact with the surface beneath it.
In engineering terms, the machine was more balanced.
In landscaping terms, it was now ready to attack.
The drive had been laid to provide a neat, welcoming approach to the farm buildings. It was designed to crunch pleasantly beneath tyres and look quietly appropriate beside the old brick yard.
It was not designed to be flail-mown.
With the implement lowered, the tractor moved forward quite happily while the flail dug, scraped and rearranged everything behind it. The machine that had struggled to cut the fields evenly now displayed remarkable determination when presented with several tonnes of professionally laid gravel.
I made my way slowly back to the garage, leaving a trail that looked less like tyre marks and more like the opening stages of a drainage project.
The tidy surface was gouged, displaced and redistributed. Raising the flail threatened to tip the entire arrangement sideways; lowering it allowed us to proceed while maximising the damage.
It was the perfect mechanical solution to the tractor’s problem and the worst possible solution to ours.
Winston observed the final approach from a safe distance. He watched the tractor list, the flail dig and the gravel move with the quiet expression of a dog whose worst assumptions about human competence had once again been confirmed.
The birds survived. The telephone survived. The tractor made it home.
The new gravel drive was the day’s only confirmed casualty.
By the end of the afternoon, I had preserved the bird life, cut part of the grass, found my telephone, inhaled half a meadow and converted a professionally laid drive into a piece of experimental land art.
The tan was mostly dust.
The horsefly bites were genuine.
Earlier in the week, the Morgan had required nearly two days on a trickle charger before finally starting just as the rain arrived. The tractor, by contrast, started perfectly, spent the afternoon trying to dismantle itself and then destroyed the drive on the way home.
The Morgan refuses to move. The tractor moves when it should stop and stops when it should move.
The only constant in both stories is me.
I am beginning to see a pattern.
Me and machinery are not friends.
The tractor is back in the garage. I will now be returning to manual labour, armed with a rake, to persuade the drive back into something resembling normality.
Well, that’s my story anyway.
In engineering terms, the machine was more balanced. In landscaping terms, it was now ready to attack.