Reinstatement

Now that I’ve got a basic ‘anti-sanglier’ barrier in place on the two sides of my land from which I think the wild boar come to attack it, it was time to attempt to repair the extensive damage that they did on their last visit. A full repair was overoptimistic. Much of the affected area has now been dug up and put back six times so it was already bumpy with large areas showing bare earth rather than grass due to the impossibility of replacing the uprooted turf perfectly.

Dealing with sanglier damage is not like laying turf or repairing a golf divot. Much of the uprooted grass is tossed some distance away from where it came from and the best that you can do is replace it to fill in the damaged areas and try to get them back again to something like level. When I came here, the grass on my land was considerably better than what I left behind at Plazac but it’ll be some time before I’ll be able to say that again about the land at the bottom, when it has had a chance to begin to recover after the spring arrives.

It took quite a few hours to deal with the damage and the most that I can say is that the ground was ‘reinstated’ as best as possible rather than ‘repaired’. Even so, there’s not much now to see from the top as the following image shows.

Yes, there’s still a bit of damage in the far corner, but that’s the result of mole (‘taupe’) activity and there’s no point trying to deal with that for the moment. The little rascal seems to be moving across my land and onto my neighbour’s and with a bit of luck once he’s there he’ll keep moving.

Here are some shots of the damaged areas after reinstatement.

I’m hoping that this will be the last time I’ll have to do this job. Six times is more than enough I think. I spent the rest of the afternoon wiring the fence mesh to the tensioned suspension wires. There’s still a lot to do but I should get the job finished during the week so I can get on with making the gates.

I hadn’t attached the mesh to a large length of the middle and bottom wires along the bottom fence section and when I came to do it I found that the mesh was stretched and bulgy. It certainly wasn’t like that when I put it up so I think that the sanglier probably had a go at it when they came last time but gave up and found a way around it onto my land as at that time most of the long northern section wasn’t in place.

They’re not daft and just found their way up to where the mesh ended. That won’t be possible now, especially as I’ve blocked the bottom gateway with an old pallet and the one along the northern long edge with my small trailer. I just hope that all my assumptions are correct and that they are not, indeed, coming from the opposite direction… 😐