Chris Skinner's Countryside Podcasts

158 Episodes

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Episode 2.92 - Death Watch Frass and Nightshade Berries

2026-10-0350:45

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...

Episode 2.91 - Tenancy Act and Norfolk Gem

2026-09-2649:20

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 land...

Episode 2.90 - Fairy Rings and Giant Puffballs

2026-09-1951:24

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 r...

Episode 2.89 - Ivy Bees and Falling Ash

2026-09-1242:35

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 (Col...

Episode 2.88 - One-Tooth Charlie and Glacial Water

2026-09-0543:22

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 t...

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