Loading groups of around eight animals together onto the cattle truck can be fraught as animals try to avoid the trip up to the farm to their warm, covered, deep strawed yards.

In the meantime the remaining cattle have to wait until the lorry returns. It therefore, can take most of the day to clear one pasture.

Realistically one day a week can be set aside for moving livestock and therefore the process may appear to take a long time with cattle being removed over a period of four or five weeks.

Fortunately, the cattle had left the pastures for the winter ahead of engineering work to replace the floodgates. Perhaps even more fortunate was the fact that the autumn was dry and ground conditions excellent for transporting the heavy gates and winding gear over Freemen's Great Common and almost no damage was caused to the pasture.

Now, when the rain does begin to fall, after an interlude of over a year, there will be a fully operational set of gates to control excess floodwater.


With the cattle gone, the winter work schedule begins in earnest. This programme includes work to the plantations on Brundon Lane, where the original grant-aided close-spaced tree-planting scheme meant that, without intervention, all the trees would have grown very tall with just small tufts of branches at the top and a woodland floor completely devoid of plant and animal life. In this state the trees would have been very prone to wind blow.

This year's quota of marked trees has already been coppiced. The work was once again carried out by the Riverside Projects Team, a fantastic band of volunteers who have been making a difference to their local environment for the past four years or so.

In addition, leaning trees along the Brundon Lane have been removed. One or two trees have been ring-barked to provide standing dead wood which woodpeckers find much to their liking as they attract the wood boring insects that they feed on.


Signs of the rich diversity of wildlife on the riverside are there for those who have the interest and the inclination to look. Occasionally interesting wildlife sightings are also reported. The otter, for example, has been making a come-back in East Anglia for a number of years and has become increasingly evident on our river systems to those who know what to look out for.

Otter spraints or droppings are recorded fairly regularly at specific locations on the river passing through the Sudbury Common Lands. One resident, however, was fortunate enough to see an otter moving from a recently restored pond to the river at Brundon.

A week later, a report came from Cornard of an otter padding past someone's house in the early hours of the morning with a fish in its mouth.