The battle rages on

I pressed on today with my ‘anti-sanglier’ fence as I said I would do in my earlier post this morning. In fact I did put the rest of the fence mesh into place along the long northern side of my land before getting involved with constructing some sort of barrier inside the bushes along the bottom because I knew that the latter would be a messy business, which it was.

Here are a couple of shots of the new long side fence mesh with the latter secured just on the posts and not on the tensioned suspension wires, but sufficient so that whatever else happened today, I’d have a virtually complete barrier against further sanglier incursions.

I did better than I expected I would erecting a barrier inside the bushes, mainly because there was enough mesh left on the first roll to extend from the last post in the corner half-way down the rest of the bottom of my land inside the bushes.

I haven’t bothered with having suspension wires – I’ve just attached the mesh to the large oaks with metal staples and to the smaller trees and saplings inside the bushes with wire loops. I’ve also not made them too tight in order to allow for a little bit of expansion of the trunks and branches but at the end of the day the mesh has to be secure because as we now know, the sanglier are nothing if not persistent and will ram their way through it if they sense that there’s little resistance.

Here’s a shot taken from the outside, of where it ends up.

Here’s a shot of the mesh run looking into the bushes from the last fence post.

This shot is of half-way along the mesh and shows how it abutts against the slope along its bottom edge.

This shows its end, which is half-way along the (eastern) bottom edge of my land. This is how far what was left on the first roll of mesh extended and I have the option of extending it by a couple of metres or so should I need to, of which more in a moment

And finally, here’s a view looking back inside the bushes to the last fence post in the corner.

There is what looks like a small animal run into the bushes where the mesh ends but I think (although, what do I know) that the slope in the bushes is too steep there for the sangliers to climb up. If so, I’d prefer not to extend the mesh as I don’t want to discourage the small animals who have a right to be there and don’t do any damage. However, if I find that the sangliers can still come onto my land I’ll have no choice but to do so.

I think that I will extend it before the bushes start to grow as when they become thick, as they will do soon, it’ll be more difficult to get in there. And there are lots of nasty brambles to scratch you to bits which will then also be more difficult to avoid.

I’ve tried to make a bit of a barrier to the entrance into the bushes using old branches, stuff like that. However, I don’t think that it’ll be able to stop the sangliers and it’ll be the mesh, that will be hidden in the bushes by then, that will hopefully do the job of halting their progress. Hopefully… 😐