Grazing returns to Chailey Common

East Sussex County Council, which will have to spend an extra £63,000 of tax payers’ money making temporary chicanes permanent to try to calm traffic and dull the pounding noise from the newly installed grids, insists that grazing “is the only way of saving” the Common for future generations.

Hebridean sheep, Sussex cattle and Exmoor ponies will return to the Common for the second successive year as part of a scheme to halt the encroachment of invasive trees and plants which threaten the ancient habitat.

An application by the county council on behalf of Chailey Common Management Committee, to fence the five commons which make up the nature reserve and allow livestock to graze the site was approved at a public inquiry in 2009 and grazing was reintroduced last year.

Cattle grids were put in at North Common Road and Beggar’s Wood Road, which run between some of the Commons.

John Smith, chairman of the Chailey Common Management Committee, said: “The grazing should be seen as a long term, ongoing project, and experts from Natural England advise it is the best way of sensitively managing the site for wildlife and opening up more of the Common for walkers and horse riders.

“Heathland is a very scarce, diminishing resource. Without action now it will be lost forever, and if you lose the heathland, you lose all the wildlife which goes with it.”

Tony Ewell, who has lived in the area for more than 30 years wrote to the Planning Inspectorate over three years ago arguing that the enclosures would have been unnecessary if invasive plants had been managed and dealt with more effectively.

Resident Kate Jenkins, who has vowed to fight on to end the “nightmare noise” from the grids, told the Middy in January: “Cattle grids in the New Forest have a different design and are more rounded to minimise noise. The council should have done its homework. The noise is shocking and dreadful and it’s like listening to a pounding oil rig.”