Strimming and overgrowth clearance in Topsham

The historic core is dense merchant houses and cottages with gardens running back from them, often walled in brick and often much longer than the frontage suggests. They are lovely plots and they are enclosed on every side, so a machine goes in through a house, a passage or a gate off a back lane and nothing else.

The clearing out is therefore the awkward half. Where there is a gate onto a lane the arisings go straight into the trailer; where there is not, they come out in bags by hand, and that is worth allowing an extra hour for on anything more than a light cut.

Topsham has salt marsh and mudflat on three sides, and the ground closest to the water grows in its own way. Reed, coarse salt tolerant grass and bramble take the top of a bank, and the whole strip stays damp with estuary air even in a dry spell.

Cutting near the water is straightforward work but slower, because the growth is wet and heavy and the ground underneath is often soft. Boundaries backing onto Bowling Green Marsh and the reserve are also worth timing carefully, since the birds and the seasons are part of what makes the place what it is.

The estuary funnels wind up from the south and the air is damp and salt laden all year. That combination holds growth back on the most exposed faces and pushes it hard in every sheltered corner, so a garden here is often half burnt off and half jungle at the same time.

The sheltered side is where the work is. Walled gardens, courtyards and the lee of a hedge all grow far more than the open ground beside them, and they are the parts people notice have got away.

Access is the practical constraint here more than anywhere else on the list. Fore Street and the Strand are narrow, busy and parked, and there is nowhere to leave a pickup and trailer casually for four hours.

Where a yard, a drive or a permit can be used it changes the shape of the day. Say what is available when booking and the job gets planned around it rather than against it.

Not all of the town is historic core. The Victorian and Edwardian streets behind it, and the modern infill out towards the Exeter road, have conventional plots with side access and somewhere to park, and they work like ordinary suburban clearances.

For a first booking it is worth saying which part of town a property is in, because the difference between an infill plot with a drive and a walled garden off the Strand is most of the difference in the estimate.