Strimming and overgrowth clearance in Bovey Tracey

The moor drops off into the clay basin right at the town, and bracken runs down the slopes with it. On the lanes and paddocks climbing towards the moor it is the dominant growth: chest high by midsummer, dense enough to hide the ground completely, and back again the following year from a root system that a single cut does not touch.

Cutting it is not difficult, it is just relentless, and the timing matters more than the effort. June, once the fronds are fully out, takes the most out of it; a second cut in late July is what actually weakens it. One cut in spring is the least useful thing anybody can do.

Conditions change here faster than anywhere else covered. Thin soil over granite higher up gives rough grass, gorse and bracken; heavy wet clay in the basin below gives rushes, thick tussock and standing water. The same owner can have both on one holding.

That is why an estimate for this area asks where on the hill a property sits. The square metres mean very little on their own when one field cuts at twice the rate of the next one.

The lanes running up onto the moor are lined with smallholdings and paddocks, and their boundary work is long: hedgebank faces, gateways, the ground around field shelters, and the margins that the grazing has retreated from.

That is day work. Arisings normally stay where they fall, and stock has to be off the ground before a machine starts, which on this kind of holding usually means moving them the evening before rather than on the morning.

The moor edge catches rain coming in off the south west and the town sits below it, so rainfall here is well above the county average. Growth is vigorous because of it and the cutting window in any given week is narrower than it is twenty miles inland.

Dates here move for weather more often than anywhere else covered. That is not a failure of planning; cutting sodden bracken is slow, wasteful work and produces a worse result than waiting two days.

Bovey Heathfield and the heath ground around it bring gorse, heather and birch scrub right up to some boundaries. Cutting those edges keeps a fence line usable, and the timing has to respect what is nesting and what is growing next to it.

Where a boundary runs onto a reserve or protected ground, the cut stops at the line and no further. Anything beyond it belongs to whoever manages the site, and it is theirs to schedule.

For a first booking here it helps to say roughly how high up the hill a property sits, because that single fact tells you more about how the ground will cut than the size of the plot does.