Boarish behaviour part deux

“we just love digging pump tracks with Bikevillage!”

You know you’re living in the country when you start shopping in places with catalogues like this. What exactly is that cover-shot? Agri-sexual?

Anyway, the scores so far are: Wild Boar Fraternity 2 , Bikevillage Pump Track 0. That’s right, they came back for more and totally smashed a nicely sculpted and compacted table top. Why do such a bad thing? Well, apart from being swine, they also love apples. I dug that pump track at the end of autumn in an apple orchard which had just seen a bumper season. All of which means the apple cores built into the track are acting like nuggets of gold in the California hills circa Goldrush time. The boars are like dirty old miners but with even worse teeth. Now photoshop that mental image onto the catalog cover and see what you’re left with. That’s right, it’s a total nightmare.

this is roughly how things should look…

The solution? Well that’s where the catalogue comes in. It was handed to me today by a potentially gene-corrupted ‘salesman’ in a shop who’s name basically translates as ‘Savoie Animal Rearing’. Indeed. They sold me 100m of mesh fencing to surround the pump track and hopefully keep those truffling terrorists out. Tonight will tell – if they’ve smashed through the fencing in the morning then I’m off to our neighbour Julien the goat farmer (I did say we live in the country) to borrow a monster battery pack and light that fence up – that’s right, it will also work as an electric fence. Anyone smell burning?

…this is not. Thanks Mr Boar.

And the damage so far? well they’ve destroyed one 180 degree berm, 3 rollers and aforementioned tabletop. It had all only been shaped by the digger so was just compacting under the snow before we hand shaped it next month. The earth is still all roughly in the right place so it won’t take as long as it took to dig in the first place, although I no longer have that beautiful mini-digger to help me.

If they manage to ruin any of the sections I hand finished I really will go and buy a gun – luckily they’ve all been protected by snow so far.

Updates to follow!