We couldn’t not talk about the drought, resulting fires, Callum’s recent pizza oven woes (spoiler alert: he wasn’t even cooking a pizza) and Prideaux’s forays into making charcoal!
There are a few announcements in this week’s episode so listen through to the end and enjoy!
CountrySlide is a podcast that looks at farming, conservation and life in the British countryside.You can contact us by email on: contact@countryslide.co.uk
Edited and Produced by Amy Green.
This transcript was generated using AI and may contain minor errors.
Richard Prideaux
Sweet, sweet Jesus, Barry and all the baby orphans. Can we please have some [bleep] rain? Rain, rain, rain.
Richard Negus
It's not going to happen. It's not going to happen.
Richard Prideaux
Everything's yellow out there. Basically, everything is dead, dead bits with the soil underneath and that's it. All the trees are dying.
Richard Negus
It's something that even at Reform HQ they're all going, 'The climate's changed a bit.' 'Who said that? Who said the climate's changing?' 'Well, I did. It's hotter than it used to be.' 'Right. Send him out.'
Richard Prideaux
Yeah. I feel like we should have discussed this at some point in the last maybe 25 years or so. Yeah.
Richard Negus
Let's be perfectly honest: the writing has been on the wall that this is happening. We don't need to hang every miner—as in E-R, not O-R.
Richard Prideaux
From Thatcher and Scargill.
Richard Negus
Yes, like Thatcher. We don't need to actually kill all the miners for the sins of their past. But, yeah, the climate has changed. It is clearly obvious that it has. Anyone who works on the land could have told you this for the last five or six years: we've started to see these weird weather patterns and strange reactions from nature. 'Isn't the blackthorn early?' Yes, the blackthorn is repeatedly early. It's obvious what's been going on.
Richard Prideaux
Stuff's getting very, very strange. People put a positive spin on things by saying, 'The vineyards of the Peak District are going to do very well,' and, 'You can grow sweet chestnuts in North Wales now.' Not if it doesn't fecking rain.
Callum McInerney-Riley
Yeah. You can also get a good tan on Irish, white-skinned legs. So, you know, every cloud...
Richard Prideaux
Sorry, I'm just talking over you now. Callum, Amy and I were together on Friday. We measured the tarmac temperature at about 47 degrees in a completely airless car park in Skelmersdale, with heat reflecting off every metal surface—which is where he told me to be and paid me to be.
Richard Negus
That sounds very silly. You need to be paid to be in Skelmersdale car park, wouldn't you?
Callum McInerney-Riley
At one point, I put my knee on the floor and burnt it. I was trying to get a shot from a low angle and I was like, 'This shouldn't happen here.'
Richard Negus
No, not in Skelmersdale. Oh, it's been hot in Skelmersdale.
Callum McInerney-Riley
It wasn't like I put my knee on black, freshly laid tarmac or something. It was grey, dusty gravel and it still burnt my knee. So, yeah—mad.
Richard Prideaux
I was there to fly drones and, at one point, I just hovered the drone above my head as a way of cooling down.
Richard Negus
Wafted by drone. I have to say, harvest is in full swing here in sunny Suffolk. Reports thus far are that the oilseed rape is coming in and looking quite good. I'm not entirely sure how farmers have universally got around cabbage stem flea beetle and not being allowed to use neonicotinoids, but a crop that was more or less written off three or four years ago is now being grown effectively—so well done them. I'm told it's okay. The bad news on beans is that they're about the size of peas, so they'll be making a loss again. Barley—hell, that started coming in about three weeks ago—and wheat is ready to go as well. Bizarrely, I did some of my very amateurish wheat testing by doing the test between your teeth.
Richard Prideaux
What is it with this podcast and amateurish farm assessment?
Richard Negus
It basically is the podcast for amateurs. I did that grip test between my teeth and nearly lost a bloody molar because it's that hard and desiccated already.
Callum McInerney-Riley
At least the dentists are in business.
Richard Negus
Exactly. The dentists are coming out well from it. Also, all those know-nothings who seem to think Roundup is somehow akin to Satan's own spawn: no one's having to spray anything off because the sun has done it all. This is desiccated as hell. I've heard eight tonnes a hectare on some wheat around here, which is pretty good. But it's very dry, so the guys are having to work extremely early in the morning, when there's a bit of moisture about. At the moment, I'm working on a project to try to bring thatching straw back into the rotations in our farm cluster. You put something off for absolutely ages: 'That's ages away. Harvest isn't until ages away.' It's now 14 July and some people are a third of the way through harvest. I'm thinking, '[bleep], I haven't even sorted out this rather obscure Maris...' That's the name of the seed we've got to get.
Richard Prideaux
That's the BBC Radio Suffolk presenter, I'm sure.
Richard Negus
Maris Widgeon. Yeah, that's a very good idea, actually. It does sound like the sort of name a BBC Radio Suffolk presenter would have.
Callum McInerney-Riley
That's my pseudonym. That's why I write all my complaint letters.
Richard Prideaux
Put that in the book. Put that in the other book.
Richard Negus
Yours sincerely, Maris Widgeon.
Callum McInerney-Riley
I keep writing to Shooting Times asking where Richard Negus is. 'He was my best, best writer ever. Love, Maris Widgeon.'
Richard Negus
I don't like that one. Well, it's Maris—Maris Widgeon. That's what we're after. There are only 30 tonnes of seed available from harvest 2026, and we've managed to ring-fence five tonnes for our use. Imagine having only 30 tonnes of this stuff in the whole country. We've ring-fenced five tonnes to go into the High Suffolk cluster's 'thatching straw, we're going to go and save the planet' project.
Richard Prideaux
Very commendable.
Richard Negus
Yeah.
Callum McInerney-Riley
Because seeds and things trade in a specific way, quite a lot of people—especially in America—who were farmers or got into farming end up in finance. They spend their whole lives trading wheat, looking at commodity prices and forecasting. Eventually they're like, 'I could farm this, or I could just trade the stuff I'm already trading, do it times a thousand and make lots of money.' Apparently, American farming conferences are a bit like going to Bloomberg or something. It becomes so entrenched in finance. It's mad.
Richard Prideaux
They're not a million miles away from that. This is another bit of Richard Negus's journalism. In the Scribehound writers' chat today, there was a discussion about pigeons and what to attribute to whom. Someone had posted on Instagram, or somewhere, that they'd shot 800 pigeons—some ridiculous number—and whether that was the right thing to put on social media. You made the calculation that it was only so many kilos of seed they'd taken.
Richard Negus
Forty kilograms. Eight hundred pigeons will have consumed 40 kilograms of wheat. We always say we're shooting pigeons as pests. You most definitely are if you're shooting them over young, emerging peas or oilseed rape: when that reaches the second-leaf stage, they come in and mallet it, and it doesn't grow back. They are a serious agricultural pest. But if you're shooting them right now and they are consuming combinable wheat, I looked at what the average pigeon crop can take. Eight hundred pigeons would have only 40 kilos of wheat in their crops combined, which comes to about £2.83 at current wheat prices.
Richard Prideaux
So, given current cartridge prices, what's an Eley Pigeon Select? What's that—sort of like...?
Richard Negus
I think, yeah, exactly.
Richard Prideaux
It's a bit more. Isn't it 13 or 14? Unless you're buying a slab. You'd be better off going into the field, pointing at 800 pigeons, then digging a fiver out of your wallet and handing it to the farmer. You'll both be in profit.
Richard Negus
Exactly. I don't know what a pigeon breast retails at, but there's no doubt about it: the pigeon is an agricultural pest. It annoyed the wick off me when those people from Wild Justice started messing around with the licence.
Richard Prideaux
General Licence. Yeah, don't get me started on that. In Wales, we lost a lot.
Richard Negus
You did, agreed. One could argue that, by fiddling around with it—and, in a way, they're right—just treating various species as sporting targets raises the question, 'Did you need to shoot that now?' But the GWCT did some research which, sadly, didn't get the recognition it should have done. There was a demonstrable decline that year in wild broods of pheasants and grey partridges, courtesy of the number of corvids around after their shenanigans. What's noticeable is that a fairly honest broker—I know he isn't everyone's mate—Mark Avery, had dipped out of Wild Justice by that point. I think he's got a very big bee in his bonnet about driven grouse shooting, but on the whole he is an honest broker. Whether his departure was due to his slightly poor health, or because he thought, 'Just winning this battle is not necessarily doing anything for the war effort,' I don't know.
Richard Prideaux
No. I asked Iolo Williams about this the one time I met him, although it was during my moustache-owning period about a year and a half ago. In the one photo of me standing next to him, I'm wearing very short shorts and a very short T-shirt, and I've got a moustache. I look like I've just jumped out of the bushes.
Richard Negus
Or you were a Selous Scout.
Richard Prideaux
Yes, exactly that. Yes, it's the full, yeah, Rhodesian.
Richard Negus
Full Rhodesian, yeah.
Richard Prideaux
I asked him about this and he said, 'For the General Licences, you have to follow the science—and the science says that magpie numbers are declining.' But, as we've discussed several times before, that's complete [bleep], because there isn't a huge army of ecologists whose sole job is to record bird numbers. Things are recorded through local environmental records, and that still relies on people being asked to record stuff. The more common something is, the less likely people are to record it. So common things will decline under that methodology, in sheer numerical terms, unless you're counting everything—and no one is.
Richard Negus
Yes, quite. So, anyway, cheers, cheers, cheers for a hot day. Cheers.
Richard Prideaux
Yes. Other podcasts in our sector do, 'What are you drinking?' I think Guns on Pegs do that. What are you drinking there, Richard?
Richard Negus
I am drinking Aspall Premier Cru Cyder. A good drink for a hot day.
Richard Prideaux
How about you there, young Callum?
Callum McInerney-Riley
I can't afford real beer, so I'm drinking [unclear] from Aldi—Despacitos. Later I might move on to [unclear]. I love an Aldi special, me. Love it.
Richard Negus
They do like all that stuff, don't they, on Guns on Pegs, asking what people are drinking, what colour are your garters?
Richard Prideaux
I think they should be applauded for how openly they talk about certain subjects, given how closeted the British countryside can be. It's very difficult to open up. Let's check in with Guns on Pegs and see what they're saying now: 'Portable, pop it in the car, take it up the shoot, have a few sausages after a work day—bloody fantastic.' That's quite brave to come out with on a mainstream podcast, isn't it?
Richard Negus
Really? Is it good for young people to be encouraged to take it up the chute?
Richard Prideaux
With willing participants of a valid age, everyone able to give consent in the correct way, everything done safely—and don't scare the horses—I suppose it's okay.
Callum McInerney-Riley
I, for one, support Avian in his LGBT, HGTV-plus-Sky-TV endeavour. Fantastic. I'm so for it.
Richard Prideaux
I mean, are you going to support him with a prop? Are you going to hold his coat for him?
Callum McInerney-Riley
I think they call me an ally. You know, it's not for me, but I'm an ally.
Richard Negus
That's Guns on Pegs Ally.
Callum McInerney-Riley
That's why I am on Blue Sky.
Richard Negus
Yeah. We were discussing what T-shirts we should have. Perhaps we should have: 'Countryslide—Guns on Pegs ally. Take it up the chute.' It's a nice idea.
Callum McInerney-Riley
I think just 'Take it up the chute' would be a great T-shirt.
Richard Prideaux
Just roll off one; I'll send it to Avian. If you listen to the rest of that Guns on Pegs episode, it is very [bleep]. They talk about leather-based fire flappers that can be used for other purposes. There are all sorts of things in there.
Richard Negus
Well, I went on there once and they made me have some pink garters afterwards. People keep saying the countryside is, A, racist and, B, not diverse. Avian's Cornish, so that's an ethnic minority.
Richard Prideaux
He's an ethnic minority.
Richard Negus
And clearly there's diversity, as you've just portrayed with that short clip, Richard.
Richard Prideaux
And I've found gay racists in the countryside quite often, actually.
Callum McInerney-Riley
Yeah, nothing wrong with them. Some of my best friends are gay racists.
Richard Negus
I don't know nothing.
Richard Prideaux
Anyway, enough talking about.
Callum McInerney-Riley
I've heard the countryside is full of the most diverse people ever. Not specifically in ethnicity, I will say; that's slightly skewed towards the generally white.
Richard Prideaux
The 98.5% white British, yeah.
Callum McInerney-Riley
But the people you get on shoot days—you've got proper local types. You go to a Norfolk shoot day and listen to the people in the beating line. On some shoots, you'll have heart surgeons from one of the best hospitals in the world. Then you'll have someone you think, 'I wouldn't possibly trust you to look after my cat if I went away for the weekend. I'm not sure how you got dressed this morning. Why do you have a shotgun? I know why you're in the beating team and not with a gun.'
Richard Negus
This is no word of a lie. Before a day, you have a sweepstake on the number of birds that are going to be shot and the cartridges that will be expended. I went on a day where all the guns and beaters were in the same sort of shed—a barn would give it too much credibility. There were three Xs where you put your name. They'd put some numbers, then an X: a scribble which could have been 31 or 842, then another scribble for cartridges expended. And you think, 'You actually can't write, can you?' You look at these old boys and think: they've got quite a good firewood business, or they're very good agricultural contractors, but you know they probably left school at 14, at the request of the headmaster, and paid no attention from about the age of ten. Speak to them about [unclear] and they'll give you an expert opinion. But ask them to write down how many cartridges they think will be expended and how many birds will be shot, and they can't write the numbers. Their own name is basically a squiggle. It's quite fascinating, really.
Callum McInerney-Riley
That's quite extreme, to be that illiterate. You pick up quite basic stuff, but, yeah, that does exist. It's quite mad.
Richard Prideaux
Yeah, I could probably find you ten people locally whom I could point to and go, 'I think they're at that level.'
Richard Negus
Yeah. Because.
Richard Prideaux
Particularly if it isn't just writing something down for the sweepstake, but applying to the Welsh Government for a grant, filling in a form or submitting prior notification of waste storage so you don't get fined. That whole world they have to work with to remain legal just doesn't exist for them. Here in Wales, we've got Farming Connect. You can go to them and say, 'I want to do this, but I have no idea how to get this grant or what's available.' They'll tell you what you can apply for and help you find funded training for chainsaw tickets and so on. There is some help out there, but quite a few people are still like that. As you say, they have so much knowledge about things that have gone by. We'll mourn their passing a little, because they were a feature of the countryside that just won't be there any more.
Richard Negus
They are utterly a feature of the countryside. Probably, now, they would be diagnosed with dyspraxia, dyslexia or something similar. I'm 55, and I know that children in my era who were slow were put in the remedial class, given bits of Plasticine and told, 'Off you go, you're going to be fit for nothing.' A lot of these old boys truly struggle to write their names. But if you engage with them, there is a reticence you find quite frequently in rural working-class people. If you've got an accent like mine, they think, 'Is he one of us, or is he one of them?' You chat to them and very quickly discover they are the absolute doyens of society. They're probably the captain of the bell-ringers and the one person who can tell you exactly where to find a hazel dormouse. So, long live them—but sadly they're disappearing fast.
Richard Prideaux
Oh yeah, that's the fellows who cut the hay. That's something that's come up very, very recently in upland management.
Hello everybody, Richard Prideaux here. Yes, that's right: the one in Wales, not the one who messes around with hedges—although I have been known to fondle a hedge or two. This is an insert. This is Richard from the future, really, telling you about a few things I forgot to put in this episode. I'm a bit crap.
The Game Fair bingo card is pretty much ready to go. We've just got one more thing to work out, but it will be available to purchase online from 9am on Saturday morning. That's this coming Saturday, which I believe is 18 July. The way it works is that you go to the link at the bottom of the episode notes, or to store.sidecountry.co.uk, where you'll see it available as a product. It will cost only £1, because you're downloading an A4 PDF to print yourself. There will be three options. You can choose option one, two or three, and you'll get the corresponding bingo card. On there, you'll find all sorts of things to tick off at the Game Fair. The winner gets to know that they've won—and that's it.
I want you to tag us on social media: tag Countryslide on Instagram, Twitter or X, whatever we're calling it this week, and we'll see who you've spotted. If you want to take a photo of a wolf on a fleecy jumper, a dog in a pram, a pith helmet or an inappropriate kilt, you can. Don't get yourselves in trouble, but we want to see your photos if you can. All the profits from this go to the GWCT. There is a small card-processing fee—a couple of pence—which comes off each payment, but we'll pay all the remaining money to them afterwards. It's all a bit of fun and very, very silly, but they get the money.
The other thing is that we finally have T-shirts. They will also be available to buy through the link in the show notes. These are a bit of a test: we're working out whether this is going to work, whether the designs work, whether the placement and printing are correct, and all those little things. We've set it up so we're selling them for what they cost us. We're using a company called Teemill, which lets us upload the designs, then prints and sends your T-shirt when you order. Up until the Game Fair, we're listing them at cost price. We're not making any money from them; it all goes to that company, but you get them for the lowest price we can offer.
That's so you can buy one, test it and see whether it works. We want your feedback. Could the logo be smaller? Could it go lower or higher? For the ladies, maybe—I don't know whether you want dirty dunnocks pressed all the way across your lady lumps, or exactly where you want them. You can give us the feedback, because I have no idea. There will be female-specific sizes and a few different options. We've tried to make everything as clear as possible, which is why it has taken a little while to set up. Please go to the links in the show notes—that's the little bit of description you get with the podcast. At 9am on Saturday morning, you'll be able to buy all these shiny, lovely things.
Right, anyway, back to the pod. As I look out of the window, we're about to have a fantastic sunset because the air is absolutely full of smoke particles. These are actually from the Peak District wildfires. Our local wildfires here in Wales are being blown out towards Ireland. They're getting our smoke, and we're getting the smoke from Oldham.
Richard Negus
Well, I never.
Richard Prideaux
So it's blowing all the way over here. It was a very, very hazy day and you could smell burning heather and wood outside. I've got friends in Canada who talk about smelling smoke from wildfires hundreds of miles away. You think, 'Yeah, right.' But bloody hell, you can.
Richard Negus
The wildfire thing is clearly the whole playbook that the moorland groups and others have been warning about: an accident waiting to happen has now happened. Do you think their warnings went unheeded because, A, they were slightly aggressive in some of their earlier tactics? Or, B, people would almost rather see others fry than admit that grouse-moor owners and managers were correct?
Richard Prideaux
I've got a slightly different take on it here in Wales, but this illustrates the point. We have one active grouse moor in Wales, right on the border near Wrexham. It's a tiny place, kept very well, and it's where you'll find black grouse as well. Beyond that, we've got lots of abandoned grouse moors which are now just sheep grazing.
Richard Negus
Yeah, you showed me some, didn't you?
Richard Prideaux
Yeah, exactly. We went to see them: basically covered in bracken and dead heather from the heather beetle that's gone through. Think about that high road we drove, where we met the mad old man with the model gliders. Given how dry it is now, if you went up there with a match you could probably get the whole hillside going in five minutes.
We don't really have grouse moors, so the grouse-moor management argument doesn't exist in Wales. The Moorland Association isn't relevant here. The National Gamekeepers' Organisation, which has a huge input into this, BASC and other organisations don't really have a voice in upland management. Although there are shoots on the Welsh uplands, they aren't grouse shoots and aren't managed as such; they're pheasant pens at the edge of a mountain. So it's Natural Resources Wales, the NFU, the Farmers' Union of Wales and the fire service that talk about it. Land management doesn't come into it as much as you might think. The argument here is basically: just re-wet it or let trees grow. That's about it.
Natural Resources Wales has really restricted burning. I think the current position is that you can burn only from 1 November to 15 March. If you do it a day outside that, it knackers your farm payments. So many places mow, using robotic flail mowers and similar equipment, but that leaves a lot of woody debris behind. Virtually no burning happens here now.
Two hundred acres went up on Conwy Mountain this weekend, where Gareth Wyn Jones—previously mentioned on this podcast—farms. But the fire stopped wherever there was a change in vegetation: at a dry-stone wall with grazing on one side and not the other, or at a well-used track and footway between two zones. It stopped dead and didn't jump over. That's already being used to show why you should have firebreaks and cut areas.
In England, I do think the Moorland Association said a lot of things that Natural England probably pushed back against: 'If you're saying that, we'll do the exact opposite.' It was only when the National Trust and similar landowners, and the RSPB as well, said, 'We're really concerned about wildfire. Can we start managing it like a grouse moor, just without the fox shooting?' that Natural England relented. But I don't think it was merely a case of the wrong message. I think Natural England doesn't particularly care what happens on the uplands beyond what it can measure: 'Is this peat?' We know its peat map is wrong. It does things like re-wetting and installing leaky dams, assuming that will fix everything without checking on the ground—and without accounting for the fact, as we discussed at the beginning of the show, that it doesn't bloody rain any more.
Richard Negus
Yeah, quite.
Richard Prideaux
In the summer. I think the biggest problem is that Natural England isn't paying attention to the effects of what it has done. It's more that than the messaging from the organisations. I don't know, because it isn't something everybody encounters in Suffolk, is it? Unless you have a combine fire, that's about it.
Richard Negus
Oh, funnily enough, that was it. The first chap on the farm WhatsApp group said, 'I'm going to start the barley today.' We went, 'Oh, you're brave and early,' and—hey presto—a massive fire went up.
The thing I find wholly oxymoronic is this: I was invited to a meeting at the GWCT headquarters in the New Forest. I hadn't been there since I was a child, so I thought I'd have a bimble round. I was driving along a little open road through the forest when my view was suddenly obscured by a mass of smoke. They were burning the New Forest. That's how they manage the ingress of scrub, exactly as in the uplands. They're legally allowed to do so between 1 November and 31 March, quite understandably. The same principle applies in the uplands: you don't want to disturb birds.
Callum McInerney-Riley
It's quite wet at that point though. Is that not really hard to burn?
Richard Negus
Well, that's the thing. They do exactly the same in the uplands. You are burning heather because it's a natural process. It's something we've been doing for an extraordinarily long time. They've proven this isn't just old; it's properly old.
Callum McInerney-Riley
They reckon it goes back to the Neanderthals—they've carbon-dated it.
Richard Negus
Oh, yeah. The oldest known use of fire by humans for heating is from Suffolk, and it was Neanderthals doing it.
Callum McInerney-Riley
Your great-grandfather, wasn't it?
Richard Negus
It was my great-grandfather, yes—the Negus, spelt N-G, which I thought was a bit dodgy in the old name. But this is something we've done for such a long time. It's quite literally a trace memory of humanity. It's how we cleared forests and opened scrub so we could put cattle on it to graze.
They're allowed to burn in the New Forest because it's done by Forestry England and the Verderers of the New Forest. Although the Verderers' history goes back to the deer hunters of the New Forest, when it was a deer park, that's acceptable. Because they're doing it, apparently the carbon released is okay. But the moment you're a bloke in the uplands doing exactly the same thing, it becomes the worst thing ever.
Possibly this is coming back to bite 'us' in the [bleep], because we've been so vociferous about saying, 'You stupid bloody townie, Tony Juniper—you've got no idea what you're talking about.' If we'd been more like the Verderers and said, 'This is our historic way of managing the moor,' we might have got away with it. But, as it turns out, you in North Wales are now smelling smuts of wildfire because the likes of Juniper's gang of incompetence have allowed this to happen.
Richard Prideaux
Have you ever read any of the stuff about wildfire in North America? I was looking at how they manage it.
Richard Negus
If it's not about Suffolk, I don't read anything.
Callum McInerney-Riley
But the ones in like California and stuff are crazy, aren't they?
Richard Prideaux
They are. There's a very interesting history with the US Forest Service, and we can learn a lot from it here. There's a good book by a chap called Philip Connors, I think, called Fire Season. He used to do seasonal fire-lookout work from one of those big towers.
Richard Negus
Towers, yeah.
Richard Prideaux
You'd live in a little cabin by the tower and spend all your time up there. Your job in summer was to spot fires in the distance and take a range and bearing. You'd radio another tower, see whether they could see it and get a bearing from them, then triangulate the position. It was a really interesting system.
The book talks about the change from the mid-20th-century approach of completely suppressing every fire: always put it out; make a huge effort to extinguish any forest or grassland fire the moment you spot it; no fire should exist. What they learned was that this builds up woody debris and fuel. When you eventually get a fire you can't reach or fight in time, it takes everything. There's so much fuel and it generates so much heat that it becomes a completely devastating wildfire, rather than a smaller one from which the landscape can recover in a year or so.
They changed to assessing each fire: should we just let this one burn? Will it remove dead vegetation we no longer need? Having lots of little fires actually reduces the risk of one big fire. In the UK, we no longer have fire as part of our management process, and when one hits it properly rips through.
There are a couple of tools for listeners to look at. The National Gamekeepers' Organisation has the Moorland Wildfire Danger Index, with a map to which keepers and land managers contribute assessments of wildfire risk. At the moment it's about as bad as it can get: everything is at extreme risk, coloured purple. If you've got a house on the edge of moorland, you can see how much danger you're in.
There's also the 30-30-30 rule: if the temperature is over 30 degrees, relative humidity is below 30 per cent and wind speed exceeds 30 kilometres an hour, that's an apocalyptic wildfire scenario. The vegetation is very dry, volatile oils are already evaporating in those temperatures, and the wind can drive a fire faster than you can fight it. Those were the conditions a couple of years ago when a wildfire-fighting team in the US—I think it was in Utah—was overtaken by fire. They got into the wrong place, couldn't get out of the gully, and the fire overtook and killed them all. There's a film about it with Josh Brolin. You can go and look it up; it isn't cheerful.
Richard Negus
It sounds like one for the family on a Sunday afternoon when you're fed up with our Antiques Roadshow. Don't watch that, kids.
Richard Prideaux
Wildfire is scary.
Richard Negus
I know a few upland keepers and their relationship with fire is that they laugh. A friend sends me photographs and video when they're muirburning, and I go, 'No, you're going to die.' They know what they're doing, but they're also hugely respectful of it. Now, I'd like to move this on slightly. Before we started recording Countryslide, I happened to ask, 'Callum, have you had your hair cut?' Richard has now given us some really hot facts—if you'll pardon the pun—about loads of burnable material. Callum, have you had your hair cut, or has something else happened to it?
Callum McInerney-Riley
Well, I had a forced haircut. I recently purchased a pizza oven.
Richard Prideaux
Remember, listeners, when we said last week that he was addicted to buying kitchen gadgets?
Callum McInerney-Riley
At some point, I filled the entire pizza oven with gas.
Richard Negus
What, butane gas?
Callum McInerney-Riley
Whatever the one is. I filled the oven with gas, opened the door slightly and pressed the ignition. That caused a whoosh of flame to come out of the pizza oven and directly into my face. I held my arm up to defend my beauty from the fire. I burnt off quite a lot of my beard and eyebrows, I'd say 50 per cent of my eyelashes—which I think was the biggest shame—and most of my fringe. So I was forced to have a haircut.
Richard Negus
I have to say, they are very Essex now.
Callum McInerney-Riley
Well, they were a lot longer.
Richard Negus
They aren't hirsute, are they? You could say they were improved. But the haircut—I had to Google it because I was born in 1971, so 1970s glam rock is only a vague memory. I searched for 'weird bloke band 70s hair' and it came up immediately, because Google's brilliant.
Richard Prideaux
That's got broad results.
Richard Negus
Dave Hill, the English musician from Slade. For those of you old enough to remember him, that is now how Callum's hair looks. If you aren't old enough, Google 'Dave Hill Slade 1970s' and you'll see what our beloved Callum looks like.
Callum McInerney-Riley
I'd say I'm more like gay icon Marc Almond at present. I think that's kind of the look I'm going for.
Richard Prideaux
If you want to recreate mentally what happened in Callum's back garden, picture a Japanese soldier in one of those 1980s Commando comics being flamethrowered by a US Marine, going, 'Aieee!'
Callum McInerney-Riley
That was essentially what happened.
Richard Negus
[unclear].
Callum McInerney-Riley
Someone's going to go on ChatGPT today, aren't they?
Richard Negus
Do you know what, though? Given the transformation you've undergone, the county you're from and how they'll jump on any skincare regime or fashion notion, you may finally have landed on something that will make you rich, Callum: 'Come to my house; stick your head in my oven.'
Callum McInerney-Riley
I don't know how women wear those fake eyelashes. Every time I blink, it feels like I've got a new set of eyes. I'm conscious of every blink, because not having eyelashes any more is pretty rough. It's a really weird feeling.
Richard Negus
Well, do you know, it's quite amusing, actually, because...
Callum McInerney-Riley
I don't recommend it.
Richard Negus
I'm a bit fed up with eating muntjac, because I have a lot of it in the freezer.
Callum McInerney-Riley
That's not normal.
Richard Negus
You do know that's quite normal in our circles. I've tried all the normal things, so I got a haunch, boned it out and used the Countryside WhatsApp group to check my thought process. I thought, 'Right, I'm going to ask Hugo Campbell-Hill.' The food section is invaluable because you get direct access to people who've tried something and will say, 'Don't do that,' or to experimental chefs. You can then find out whether they're complete idiots or geniuses.
Anyway, I boned this thing out. I said, 'Hugo, what I fancy doing is rolling this almost like a breast of lamb, with some forcemeat stuffing, and then...' He said, 'Yes, that's brilliant—but barbecue it.' Literally as he said 'barbecue it', via the power of WhatsApp, up popped Callum's face burnt to a flipping Walker's crisp, saying, 'Just burnt myself on my pizza oven.' The idea of putting charcoal in my own barbecue made me think, 'Do you know what? No.'
Callum McInerney-Riley
It's like a horse. You fall off; you get back on.
Richard Negus
Yeah, but I've fallen off horses more times than most people. I never came off looking like I'd just been flamethrowered by the US Ranger Battalion on [unclear].
Callum McInerney-Riley
Yeah. I'm trying to think of that picture where the person has just been napalmed...
Richard Negus
Oh yeah.
Richard Prideaux
You're thinking of the album cover of Rage Against the Machine's first album, aren't you?
Richard Negus
Yeah, Napalm.
Callum McInerney-Riley
Napalm girl is what they call the photo.
Richard Prideaux
Not self-immolating monk.
Richard Negus
I have to say, it's quite something. Did you carry on cooking, and did everyone around you laugh?
Callum McInerney-Riley
I was cooking a chicken.
Richard Negus
A chicken in your pizza oven.
Callum McInerney-Riley
Considering I gassed it for ten minutes, it still came out quite well. No, you can't say anything else.
Richard Prideaux
Considering you've just had the kitchen redone as well, you've got a brand-new kitchen inside and have now moved outside to what would normally be a damp patio—although damp would be an improvement in current conditions—because you bought the pizza oven. So everything's happening outside. Is the kitchen now unused, or is that where you're storing all the pizza dishes and things?
Callum McInerney-Riley
Well, it's a faff getting it all outside. But, yeah, cooking with a bit of fire—fire is great, isn't it?
Richard Negus
Not according to your eyelashes, no.
Callum McInerney-Riley
Look, you can't make an omelette without breaking a few eggs. Sometimes eyebrows are collateral damage in the process.
Richard Prideaux
You really need eyebrows and yeah.
Callum McInerney-Riley
There was a good meme the other day: 'My mum didn't raise a quitter. She raised a complainer.' I complain about almost everything I have to do. I do it, and I do it well, but I'll complain the whole way. I am surprisingly optimistic. I feel like I've learned a lesson from taking my eyebrows off: don't [bleep] around with gas. It could have been worse. I could have blown something up properly, but all I did was lose some eyebrows. I'm going to be very careful in future because I know the consequences. The only damage was to my pride and eyebrows, and everyone got a laugh. So it's a win-win.
Richard Prideaux
I mean, if you're going to die, at least die in an anecdote, you know?
Callum McInerney-Riley
It was a bit like one of those scenes from Casualty where you know something is going to happen: rolling hills, then it cuts to a shot of Calor Gas, and suddenly someone's lighting a pizza oven.
Richard Negus
When we go to the Game Fair in a couple of weeks, we should parade Callum in front of the Moorland Association stand and say, 'This is what happens when you get a load of dead wood.' It would be a public service. Controlled burning is good; with an out-of-control wildfire, you end up looking like Callum. That's just how we operate at Countryslide: we provide a public service because the BBC can't be arsed any more. There we go.
Richard Prideaux
There we go. I think that's a good time to bring it to an end. This is the end of the main show; we'll go over to the patrons-only aftershow next. In the aftershow, I'm going to start by talking about my observations of Callum's interactions with his clients on Friday.
Richard Negus
Oh, yes.
Richard Prideaux
Thank you everyone.
Richard Negus
Goodbye. Bye.
Richard Prideaux
Sweet, sweet Jesus, Barry and all the baby orphans. Can we please have some [bleep] rain? Rain, rain, rain.
Richard Negus
It's not going to happen. It's not going to happen.
Richard Prideaux
Everything's yellow out there. Basically, everything is dead, dead bits with the soil underneath and that's it. All the trees are dying.
Richard Negus
It's something that even at Reform HQ they're all going, 'The climate's changed a bit.' 'Who said that? Who said the climate's changing?' 'Well, I did. It's hotter than it used to be.' 'Right. Send him out.'
Richard Prideaux
Yeah. I feel like we should have discussed this at some point in the last maybe 25 years or so. Yeah.
Richard Negus
Let's be perfectly honest: the writing has been on the wall that this is happening. We don't need to hang every miner—as in E-R, not O-R.
Richard Prideaux
From Thatcher and Scargill.
Richard Negus
Yes, like Thatcher. We don't need to actually kill all the miners for the sins of their past. But, yeah, the climate has changed. It is clearly obvious that it has. Anyone who works on the land could have told you this for the last five or six years: we've started to see these weird weather patterns and strange reactions from nature. 'Isn't the blackthorn early?' Yes, the blackthorn is repeatedly early. It's obvious what's been going on.
Richard Prideaux
Stuff's getting very, very strange. People put a positive spin on things by saying, 'The vineyards of the Peak District are going to do very well,' and, 'You can grow sweet chestnuts in North Wales now.' Not if it doesn't fecking rain.
Callum McInerney-Riley
Yeah. You can also get a good tan on Irish, white-skinned legs. So, you know, every cloud...
Richard Prideaux
Sorry, I'm just talking over you now. Callum, Amy and I were together on Friday. We measured the tarmac temperature at about 47 degrees in a completely airless car park in Skelmersdale, with heat reflecting off every metal surface—which is where he told me to be and paid me to be.
Richard Negus
That sounds very silly. You need to be paid to be in Skelmersdale car park, wouldn't you?
Callum McInerney-Riley
At one point, I put my knee on the floor and burnt it. I was trying to get a shot from a low angle and I was like, 'This shouldn't happen here.'
Richard Negus
No, not in Skelmersdale. Oh, it's been hot in Skelmersdale.
Callum McInerney-Riley
It wasn't like I put my knee on black, freshly laid tarmac or something. It was grey, dusty gravel and it still burnt my knee. So, yeah—mad.
Richard Prideaux
I was there to fly drones and, at one point, I just hovered the drone above my head as a way of cooling down.
Richard Negus
Wafted by drone. I have to say, harvest is in full swing here in sunny Suffolk. Reports thus far are that the oilseed rape is coming in and looking quite good. I'm not entirely sure how farmers have universally got around cabbage stem flea beetle and not being allowed to use neonicotinoids, but a crop that was more or less written off three or four years ago is now being grown effectively—so well done them. I'm told it's okay. The bad news on beans is that they're about the size of peas, so they'll be making a loss again. Barley—hell, that started coming in about three weeks ago—and wheat is ready to go as well. Bizarrely, I did some of my very amateurish wheat testing by doing the test between your teeth.
Richard Prideaux
What is it with this podcast and amateurish farm assessment?
Richard Negus
It basically is the podcast for amateurs. I did that grip test between my teeth and nearly lost a bloody molar because it's that hard and desiccated already.
Callum McInerney-Riley
At least the dentists are in business.
Richard Negus
Exactly. The dentists are coming out well from it. Also, all those know-nothings who seem to think Roundup is somehow akin to Satan's own spawn: no one's having to spray anything off because the sun has done it all. This is desiccated as hell. I've heard eight tonnes a hectare on some wheat around here, which is pretty good. But it's very dry, so the guys are having to work extremely early in the morning, when there's a bit of moisture about. At the moment, I'm working on a project to try to bring thatching straw back into the rotations in our farm cluster. You put something off for absolutely ages: 'That's ages away. Harvest isn't until ages away.' It's now 14 July and some people are a third of the way through harvest. I'm thinking, '[bleep], I haven't even sorted out this rather obscure Maris...' That's the name of the seed we've got to get.
Richard Prideaux
That's the BBC Radio Suffolk presenter, I'm sure.
Richard Negus
Maris Widgeon. Yeah, that's a very good idea, actually. It does sound like the sort of name a BBC Radio Suffolk presenter would have.
Callum McInerney-Riley
That's my pseudonym. That's why I write all my complaint letters.
Richard Prideaux
Put that in the book. Put that in the other book.
Richard Negus
Yours sincerely, Maris Widgeon.
Callum McInerney-Riley
I keep writing to Shooting Times asking where Richard Negus is. 'He was my best, best writer ever. Love, Maris Widgeon.'
Richard Negus
I don't like that one. Well, it's Maris—Maris Widgeon. That's what we're after. There are only 30 tonnes of seed available from harvest 2026, and we've managed to ring-fence five tonnes for our use. Imagine having only 30 tonnes of this stuff in the whole country. We've ring-fenced five tonnes to go into the High Suffolk cluster's 'thatching straw, we're going to go and save the planet' project.
Richard Prideaux
Very commendable.
Richard Negus
Yeah.
Callum McInerney-Riley
Because seeds and things trade in a specific way, quite a lot of people—especially in America—who were farmers or got into farming end up in finance. They spend their whole lives trading wheat, looking at commodity prices and forecasting. Eventually they're like, 'I could farm this, or I could just trade the stuff I'm already trading, do it times a thousand and make lots of money.' Apparently, American farming conferences are a bit like going to Bloomberg or something. It becomes so entrenched in finance. It's mad.
Richard Prideaux
They're not a million miles away from that. This is another bit of Richard Negus's journalism. In the Scribehound writers' chat today, there was a discussion about pigeons and what to attribute to whom. Someone had posted on Instagram, or somewhere, that they'd shot 800 pigeons—some ridiculous number—and whether that was the right thing to put on social media. You made the calculation that it was only so many kilos of seed they'd taken.
Richard Negus
Forty kilograms. Eight hundred pigeons will have consumed 40 kilograms of wheat. We always say we're shooting pigeons as pests. You most definitely are if you're shooting them over young, emerging peas or oilseed rape: when that reaches the second-leaf stage, they come in and mallet it, and it doesn't grow back. They are a serious agricultural pest. But if you're shooting them right now and they are consuming combinable wheat, I looked at what the average pigeon crop can take. Eight hundred pigeons would have only 40 kilos of wheat in their crops combined, which comes to about £2.83 at current wheat prices.
Richard Prideaux
So, given current cartridge prices, what's an Eley Pigeon Select? What's that—sort of like...?
Richard Negus
I think, yeah, exactly.
Richard Prideaux
It's a bit more. Isn't it 13 or 14? Unless you're buying a slab. You'd be better off going into the field, pointing at 800 pigeons, then digging a fiver out of your wallet and handing it to the farmer. You'll both be in profit.
Richard Negus
Exactly. I don't know what a pigeon breast retails at, but there's no doubt about it: the pigeon is an agricultural pest. It annoyed the wick off me when those people from Wild Justice started messing around with the licence.
Richard Prideaux
General Licence. Yeah, don't get me started on that. In Wales, we lost a lot.
Richard Negus
You did, agreed. One could argue that, by fiddling around with it—and, in a way, they're right—just treating various species as sporting targets raises the question, 'Did you need to shoot that now?' But the GWCT did some research which, sadly, didn't get the recognition it should have done. There was a demonstrable decline that year in wild broods of pheasants and grey partridges, courtesy of the number of corvids around after their shenanigans. What's noticeable is that a fairly honest broker—I know he isn't everyone's mate—Mark Avery, had dipped out of Wild Justice by that point. I think he's got a very big bee in his bonnet about driven grouse shooting, but on the whole he is an honest broker. Whether his departure was due to his slightly poor health, or because he thought, 'Just winning this battle is not necessarily doing anything for the war effort,' I don't know.
Richard Prideaux
No. I asked Iolo Williams about this the one time I met him, although it was during my moustache-owning period about a year and a half ago. In the one photo of me standing next to him, I'm wearing very short shorts and a very short T-shirt, and I've got a moustache. I look like I've just jumped out of the bushes.
Richard Negus
Or you were a Selous Scout.
Richard Prideaux
Yes, exactly that. Yes, it's the full, yeah, Rhodesian.
Richard Negus
Full Rhodesian, yeah.
Richard Prideaux
I asked him about this and he said, 'For the General Licences, you have to follow the science—and the science says that magpie numbers are declining.' But, as we've discussed several times before, that's complete [bleep], because there isn't a huge army of ecologists whose sole job is to record bird numbers. Things are recorded through local environmental records, and that still relies on people being asked to record stuff. The more common something is, the less likely people are to record it. So common things will decline under that methodology, in sheer numerical terms, unless you're counting everything—and no one is.
Richard Negus
Yes, quite. So, anyway, cheers, cheers, cheers for a hot day. Cheers.
Richard Prideaux
Yes. Other podcasts in our sector do, 'What are you drinking?' I think Guns on Pegs do that. What are you drinking there, Richard?
Richard Negus
I am drinking Aspall Premier Cru Cyder. A good drink for a hot day.
Richard Prideaux
How about you there, young Callum?
Callum McInerney-Riley
I can't afford real beer, so I'm drinking [unclear] from Aldi—Despacitos. Later I might move on to [unclear]. I love an Aldi special, me. Love it.
Richard Negus
They do like all that stuff, don't they, on Guns on Pegs, asking what people are drinking, what colour are your garters?
Richard Prideaux
I think they should be applauded for how openly they talk about certain subjects, given how closeted the British countryside can be. It's very difficult to open up. Let's check in with Guns on Pegs and see what they're saying now: 'Portable, pop it in the car, take it up the shoot, have a few sausages after a work day—bloody fantastic.' That's quite brave to come out with on a mainstream podcast, isn't it?
Richard Negus
Really? Is it good for young people to be encouraged to take it up the chute?
Richard Prideaux
With willing participants of a valid age, everyone able to give consent in the correct way, everything done safely—and don't scare the horses—I suppose it's okay.
Callum McInerney-Riley
I, for one, support Avian in his LGBT, HGTV-plus-Sky-TV endeavour. Fantastic. I'm so for it.
Richard Prideaux
I mean, are you going to support him with a prop? Are you going to hold his coat for him?
Callum McInerney-Riley
I think they call me an ally. You know, it's not for me, but I'm an ally.
Richard Negus
That's Guns on Pegs Ally.
Callum McInerney-Riley
That's why I am on Blue Sky.
Richard Negus
Yeah. We were discussing what T-shirts we should have. Perhaps we should have: 'Countryslide—Guns on Pegs ally. Take it up the chute.' It's a nice idea.
Callum McInerney-Riley
I think just 'Take it up the chute' would be a great T-shirt.
Richard Prideaux
Just roll off one; I'll send it to Avian. If you listen to the rest of that Guns on Pegs episode, it is very [bleep]. They talk about leather-based fire flappers that can be used for other purposes. There are all sorts of things in there.
Richard Negus
Well, I went on there once and they made me have some pink garters afterwards. People keep saying the countryside is, A, racist and, B, not diverse. Avian's Cornish, so that's an ethnic minority.
Richard Prideaux
He's an ethnic minority.
Richard Negus
And clearly there's diversity, as you've just portrayed with that short clip, Richard.
Richard Prideaux
And I've found gay racists in the countryside quite often, actually.
Callum McInerney-Riley
Yeah, nothing wrong with them. Some of my best friends are gay racists.
Richard Negus
I don't know nothing.
Richard Prideaux
Anyway, enough talking about.
Callum McInerney-Riley
I've heard the countryside is full of the most diverse people ever. Not specifically in ethnicity, I will say; that's slightly skewed towards the generally white.
Richard Prideaux
The 98.5% white British, yeah.
Callum McInerney-Riley
But the people you get on shoot days—you've got proper local types. You go to a Norfolk shoot day and listen to the people in the beating line. On some shoots, you'll have heart surgeons from one of the best hospitals in the world. Then you'll have someone you think, 'I wouldn't possibly trust you to look after my cat if I went away for the weekend. I'm not sure how you got dressed this morning. Why do you have a shotgun? I know why you're in the beating team and not with a gun.'
Richard Negus
This is no word of a lie. Before a day, you have a sweepstake on the number of birds that are going to be shot and the cartridges that will be expended. I went on a day where all the guns and beaters were in the same sort of shed—a barn would give it too much credibility. There were three Xs where you put your name. They'd put some numbers, then an X: a scribble which could have been 31 or 842, then another scribble for cartridges expended. And you think, 'You actually can't write, can you?' You look at these old boys and think: they've got quite a good firewood business, or they're very good agricultural contractors, but you know they probably left school at 14, at the request of the headmaster, and paid no attention from about the age of ten. Speak to them about [unclear] and they'll give you an expert opinion. But ask them to write down how many cartridges they think will be expended and how many birds will be shot, and they can't write the numbers. Their own name is basically a squiggle. It's quite fascinating, really.
Callum McInerney-Riley
That's quite extreme, to be that illiterate. You pick up quite basic stuff, but, yeah, that does exist. It's quite mad.
Richard Prideaux
Yeah, I could probably find you ten people locally whom I could point to and go, 'I think they're at that level.'
Richard Negus
Yeah. Because.
Richard Prideaux
Particularly if it isn't just writing something down for the sweepstake, but applying to the Welsh Government for a grant, filling in a form or submitting prior notification of waste storage so you don't get fined. That whole world they have to work with to remain legal just doesn't exist for them. Here in Wales, we've got Farming Connect. You can go to them and say, 'I want to do this, but I have no idea how to get this grant or what's available.' They'll tell you what you can apply for and help you find funded training for chainsaw tickets and so on. There is some help out there, but quite a few people are still like that. As you say, they have so much knowledge about things that have gone by. We'll mourn their passing a little, because they were a feature of the countryside that just won't be there any more.
Richard Negus
They are utterly a feature of the countryside. Probably, now, they would be diagnosed with dyspraxia, dyslexia or something similar. I'm 55, and I know that children in my era who were slow were put in the remedial class, given bits of Plasticine and told, 'Off you go, you're going to be fit for nothing.' A lot of these old boys truly struggle to write their names. But if you engage with them, there is a reticence you find quite frequently in rural working-class people. If you've got an accent like mine, they think, 'Is he one of us, or is he one of them?' You chat to them and very quickly discover they are the absolute doyens of society. They're probably the captain of the bell-ringers and the one person who can tell you exactly where to find a hazel dormouse. So, long live them—but sadly they're disappearing fast.
Richard Prideaux
Oh yeah, that's the fellows who cut the hay. That's something that's come up very, very recently in upland management.
Hello everybody, Richard Prideaux here. Yes, that's right: the one in Wales, not the one who messes around with hedges—although I have been known to fondle a hedge or two. This is an insert. This is Richard from the future, really, telling you about a few things I forgot to put in this episode. I'm a bit crap.
The Game Fair bingo card is pretty much ready to go. We've just got one more thing to work out, but it will be available to purchase online from 9am on Saturday morning. That's this coming Saturday, which I believe is 18 July. The way it works is that you go to the link at the bottom of the episode notes, or to store.sidecountry.co.uk, where you'll see it available as a product. It will cost only £1, because you're downloading an A4 PDF to print yourself. There will be three options. You can choose option one, two or three, and you'll get the corresponding bingo card. On there, you'll find all sorts of things to tick off at the Game Fair. The winner gets to know that they've won—and that's it.
I want you to tag us on social media: tag Countryslide on Instagram, Twitter or X, whatever we're calling it this week, and we'll see who you've spotted. If you want to take a photo of a wolf on a fleecy jumper, a dog in a pram, a pith helmet or an inappropriate kilt, you can. Don't get yourselves in trouble, but we want to see your photos if you can. All the profits from this go to the GWCT. There is a small card-processing fee—a couple of pence—which comes off each payment, but we'll pay all the remaining money to them afterwards. It's all a bit of fun and very, very silly, but they get the money.
The other thing is that we finally have T-shirts. They will also be available to buy through the link in the show notes. These are a bit of a test: we're working out whether this is going to work, whether the designs work, whether the placement and printing are correct, and all those little things. We've set it up so we're selling them for what they cost us. We're using a company called Teemill, which lets us upload the designs, then prints and sends your T-shirt when you order. Up until the Game Fair, we're listing them at cost price. We're not making any money from them; it all goes to that company, but you get them for the lowest price we can offer.
That's so you can buy one, test it and see whether it works. We want your feedback. Could the logo be smaller? Could it go lower or higher? For the ladies, maybe—I don't know whether you want dirty dunnocks pressed all the way across your lady lumps, or exactly where you want them. You can give us the feedback, because I have no idea. There will be female-specific sizes and a few different options. We've tried to make everything as clear as possible, which is why it has taken a little while to set up. Please go to the links in the show notes—that's the little bit of description you get with the podcast. At 9am on Saturday morning, you'll be able to buy all these shiny, lovely things.
Right, anyway, back to the pod. As I look out of the window, we're about to have a fantastic sunset because the air is absolutely full of smoke particles. These are actually from the Peak District wildfires. Our local wildfires here in Wales are being blown out towards Ireland. They're getting our smoke, and we're getting the smoke from Oldham.
Richard Negus
Well, I never.
Richard Prideaux
So it's blowing all the way over here. It was a very, very hazy day and you could smell burning heather and wood outside. I've got friends in Canada who talk about smelling smoke from wildfires hundreds of miles away. You think, 'Yeah, right.' But bloody hell, you can.
Richard Negus
The wildfire thing is clearly the whole playbook that the moorland groups and others have been warning about: an accident waiting to happen has now happened. Do you think their warnings went unheeded because, A, they were slightly aggressive in some of their earlier tactics? Or, B, people would almost rather see others fry than admit that grouse-moor owners and managers were correct?
Richard Prideaux
I've got a slightly different take on it here in Wales, but this illustrates the point. We have one active grouse moor in Wales, right on the border near Wrexham. It's a tiny place, kept very well, and it's where you'll find black grouse as well. Beyond that, we've got lots of abandoned grouse moors which are now just sheep grazing.
Richard Negus
Yeah, you showed me some, didn't you?
Richard Prideaux
Yeah, exactly. We went to see them: basically covered in bracken and dead heather from the heather beetle that's gone through. Think about that high road we drove, where we met the mad old man with the model gliders. Given how dry it is now, if you went up there with a match you could probably get the whole hillside going in five minutes.
We don't really have grouse moors, so the grouse-moor management argument doesn't exist in Wales. The Moorland Association isn't relevant here. The National Gamekeepers' Organisation, which has a huge input into this, BASC and other organisations don't really have a voice in upland management. Although there are shoots on the Welsh uplands, they aren't grouse shoots and aren't managed as such; they're pheasant pens at the edge of a mountain. So it's Natural Resources Wales, the NFU, the Farmers' Union of Wales and the fire service that talk about it. Land management doesn't come into it as much as you might think. The argument here is basically: just re-wet it or let trees grow. That's about it.
Natural Resources Wales has really restricted burning. I think the current position is that you can burn only from 1 November to 15 March. If you do it a day outside that, it knackers your farm payments. So many places mow, using robotic flail mowers and similar equipment, but that leaves a lot of woody debris behind. Virtually no burning happens here now.
Two hundred acres went up on Conwy Mountain this weekend, where Gareth Wyn Jones—previously mentioned on this podcast—farms. But the fire stopped wherever there was a change in vegetation: at a dry-stone wall with grazing on one side and not the other, or at a well-used track and footway between two zones. It stopped dead and didn't jump over. That's already being used to show why you should have firebreaks and cut areas.
In England, I do think the Moorland Association said a lot of things that Natural England probably pushed back against: 'If you're saying that, we'll do the exact opposite.' It was only when the National Trust and similar landowners, and the RSPB as well, said, 'We're really concerned about wildfire. Can we start managing it like a grouse moor, just without the fox shooting?' that Natural England relented. But I don't think it was merely a case of the wrong message. I think Natural England doesn't particularly care what happens on the uplands beyond what it can measure: 'Is this peat?' We know its peat map is wrong. It does things like re-wetting and installing leaky dams, assuming that will fix everything without checking on the ground—and without accounting for the fact, as we discussed at the beginning of the show, that it doesn't bloody rain any more.
Richard Negus
Yeah, quite.
Richard Prideaux
In the summer. I think the biggest problem is that Natural England isn't paying attention to the effects of what it has done. It's more that than the messaging from the organisations. I don't know, because it isn't something everybody encounters in Suffolk, is it? Unless you have a combine fire, that's about it.
Richard Negus
Oh, funnily enough, that was it. The first chap on the farm WhatsApp group said, 'I'm going to start the barley today.' We went, 'Oh, you're brave and early,' and—hey presto—a massive fire went up.
The thing I find wholly oxymoronic is this: I was invited to a meeting at the GWCT headquarters in the New Forest. I hadn't been there since I was a child, so I thought I'd have a bimble round. I was driving along a little open road through the forest when my view was suddenly obscured by a mass of smoke. They were burning the New Forest. That's how they manage the ingress of scrub, exactly as in the uplands. They're legally allowed to do so between 1 November and 31 March, quite understandably. The same principle applies in the uplands: you don't want to disturb birds.
Callum McInerney-Riley
It's quite wet at that point though. Is that not really hard to burn?
Richard Negus
Well, that's the thing. They do exactly the same in the uplands. You are burning heather because it's a natural process. It's something we've been doing for an extraordinarily long time. They've proven this isn't just old; it's properly old.
Callum McInerney-Riley
They reckon it goes back to the Neanderthals—they've carbon-dated it.
Richard Negus
Oh, yeah. The oldest known use of fire by humans for heating is from Suffolk, and it was Neanderthals doing it.
Callum McInerney-Riley
Your great-grandfather, wasn't it?
Richard Negus
It was my great-grandfather, yes—the Negus, spelt N-G, which I thought was a bit dodgy in the old name. But this is something we've done for such a long time. It's quite literally a trace memory of humanity. It's how we cleared forests and opened scrub so we could put cattle on it to graze.
They're allowed to burn in the New Forest because it's done by Forestry England and the Verderers of the New Forest. Although the Verderers' history goes back to the deer hunters of the New Forest, when it was a deer park, that's acceptable. Because they're doing it, apparently the carbon released is okay. But the moment you're a bloke in the uplands doing exactly the same thing, it becomes the worst thing ever.
Possibly this is coming back to bite 'us' in the [bleep], because we've been so vociferous about saying, 'You stupid bloody townie, Tony Juniper—you've got no idea what you're talking about.' If we'd been more like the Verderers and said, 'This is our historic way of managing the moor,' we might have got away with it. But, as it turns out, you in North Wales are now smelling smuts of wildfire because the likes of Juniper's gang of incompetence have allowed this to happen.
Richard Prideaux
Have you ever read any of the stuff about wildfire in North America? I was looking at how they manage it.
Richard Negus
If it's not about Suffolk, I don't read anything.
Callum McInerney-Riley
But the ones in like California and stuff are crazy, aren't they?
Richard Prideaux
They are. There's a very interesting history with the US Forest Service, and we can learn a lot from it here. There's a good book by a chap called Philip Connors, I think, called Fire Season. He used to do seasonal fire-lookout work from one of those big towers.
Richard Negus
Towers, yeah.
Richard Prideaux
You'd live in a little cabin by the tower and spend all your time up there. Your job in summer was to spot fires in the distance and take a range and bearing. You'd radio another tower, see whether they could see it and get a bearing from them, then triangulate the position. It was a really interesting system.
The book talks about the change from the mid-20th-century approach of completely suppressing every fire: always put it out; make a huge effort to extinguish any forest or grassland fire the moment you spot it; no fire should exist. What they learned was that this builds up woody debris and fuel. When you eventually get a fire you can't reach or fight in time, it takes everything. There's so much fuel and it generates so much heat that it becomes a completely devastating wildfire, rather than a smaller one from which the landscape can recover in a year or so.
They changed to assessing each fire: should we just let this one burn? Will it remove dead vegetation we no longer need? Having lots of little fires actually reduces the risk of one big fire. In the UK, we no longer have fire as part of our management process, and when one hits it properly rips through.
There are a couple of tools for listeners to look at. The National Gamekeepers' Organisation has the Moorland Wildfire Danger Index, with a map to which keepers and land managers contribute assessments of wildfire risk. At the moment it's about as bad as it can get: everything is at extreme risk, coloured purple. If you've got a house on the edge of moorland, you can see how much danger you're in.
There's also the 30-30-30 rule: if the temperature is over 30 degrees, relative humidity is below 30 per cent and wind speed exceeds 30 kilometres an hour, that's an apocalyptic wildfire scenario. The vegetation is very dry, volatile oils are already evaporating in those temperatures, and the wind can drive a fire faster than you can fight it. Those were the conditions a couple of years ago when a wildfire-fighting team in the US—I think it was in Utah—was overtaken by fire. They got into the wrong place, couldn't get out of the gully, and the fire overtook and killed them all. There's a film about it with Josh Brolin. You can go and look it up; it isn't cheerful.
Richard Negus
It sounds like one for the family on a Sunday afternoon when you're fed up with our Antiques Roadshow. Don't watch that, kids.
Richard Prideaux
Wildfire is scary.
Richard Negus
I know a few upland keepers and their relationship with fire is that they laugh. A friend sends me photographs and video when they're muirburning, and I go, 'No, you're going to die.' They know what they're doing, but they're also hugely respectful of it. Now, I'd like to move this on slightly. Before we started recording Countryslide, I happened to ask, 'Callum, have you had your hair cut?' Richard has now given us some really hot facts—if you'll pardon the pun—about loads of burnable material. Callum, have you had your hair cut, or has something else happened to it?
Callum McInerney-Riley
Well, I had a forced haircut. I recently purchased a pizza oven.
Richard Prideaux
Remember, listeners, when we said last week that he was addicted to buying kitchen gadgets?
Callum McInerney-Riley
At some point, I filled the entire pizza oven with gas.
Richard Negus
What, butane gas?
Callum McInerney-Riley
Whatever the one is. I filled the oven with gas, opened the door slightly and pressed the ignition. That caused a whoosh of flame to come out of the pizza oven and directly into my face. I held my arm up to defend my beauty from the fire. I burnt off quite a lot of my beard and eyebrows, I'd say 50 per cent of my eyelashes—which I think was the biggest shame—and most of my fringe. So I was forced to have a haircut.
Richard Negus
I have to say, they are very Essex now.
Callum McInerney-Riley
Well, they were a lot longer.
Richard Negus
They aren't hirsute, are they? You could say they were improved. But the haircut—I had to Google it because I was born in 1971, so 1970s glam rock is only a vague memory. I searched for 'weird bloke band 70s hair' and it came up immediately, because Google's brilliant.
Richard Prideaux
That's got broad results.
Richard Negus
Dave Hill, the English musician from Slade. For those of you old enough to remember him, that is now how Callum's hair looks. If you aren't old enough, Google 'Dave Hill Slade 1970s' and you'll see what our beloved Callum looks like.
Callum McInerney-Riley
I'd say I'm more like gay icon Marc Almond at present. I think that's kind of the look I'm going for.
Richard Prideaux
If you want to recreate mentally what happened in Callum's back garden, picture a Japanese soldier in one of those 1980s Commando comics being flamethrowered by a US Marine, going, 'Aieee!'
Callum McInerney-Riley
That was essentially what happened.
Richard Negus
[unclear].
Callum McInerney-Riley
Someone's going to go on ChatGPT today, aren't they?
Richard Negus
Do you know what, though? Given the transformation you've undergone, the county you're from and how they'll jump on any skincare regime or fashion notion, you may finally have landed on something that will make you rich, Callum: 'Come to my house; stick your head in my oven.'
Callum McInerney-Riley
I don't know how women wear those fake eyelashes. Every time I blink, it feels like I've got a new set of eyes. I'm conscious of every blink, because not having eyelashes any more is pretty rough. It's a really weird feeling.
Richard Negus
Well, do you know, it's quite amusing, actually, because...
Callum McInerney-Riley
I don't recommend it.
Richard Negus
I'm a bit fed up with eating muntjac, because I have a lot of it in the freezer.
Callum McInerney-Riley
That's not normal.
Richard Negus
You do know that's quite normal in our circles. I've tried all the normal things, so I got a haunch, boned it out and used the Countryside WhatsApp group to check my thought process. I thought, 'Right, I'm going to ask Hugo Campbell-Hill.' The food section is invaluable because you get direct access to people who've tried something and will say, 'Don't do that,' or to experimental chefs. You can then find out whether they're complete idiots or geniuses.
Anyway, I boned this thing out. I said, 'Hugo, what I fancy doing is rolling this almost like a breast of lamb, with some forcemeat stuffing, and then...' He said, 'Yes, that's brilliant—but barbecue it.' Literally as he said 'barbecue it', via the power of WhatsApp, up popped Callum's face burnt to a flipping Walker's crisp, saying, 'Just burnt myself on my pizza oven.' The idea of putting charcoal in my own barbecue made me think, 'Do you know what? No.'
Callum McInerney-Riley
It's like a horse. You fall off; you get back on.
Richard Negus
Yeah, but I've fallen off horses more times than most people. I never came off looking like I'd just been flamethrowered by the US Ranger Battalion on [unclear].
Callum McInerney-Riley
Yeah. I'm trying to think of that picture where the person has just been napalmed...
Richard Negus
Oh yeah.
Richard Prideaux
You're thinking of the album cover of Rage Against the Machine's first album, aren't you?
Richard Negus
Yeah, Napalm.
Callum McInerney-Riley
Napalm girl is what they call the photo.
Richard Prideaux
Not self-immolating monk.
Richard Negus
I have to say, it's quite something. Did you carry on cooking, and did everyone around you laugh?
Callum McInerney-Riley
I was cooking a chicken.
Richard Negus
A chicken in your pizza oven.
Callum McInerney-Riley
Considering I gassed it for ten minutes, it still came out quite well. No, you can't say anything else.
Richard Prideaux
Considering you've just had the kitchen redone as well, you've got a brand-new kitchen inside and have now moved outside to what would normally be a damp patio—although damp would be an improvement in current conditions—because you bought the pizza oven. So everything's happening outside. Is the kitchen now unused, or is that where you're storing all the pizza dishes and things?
Callum McInerney-Riley
Well, it's a faff getting it all outside. But, yeah, cooking with a bit of fire—fire is great, isn't it?
Richard Negus
Not according to your eyelashes, no.
Callum McInerney-Riley
Look, you can't make an omelette without breaking a few eggs. Sometimes eyebrows are collateral damage in the process.
Richard Prideaux
You really need eyebrows and yeah.
Callum McInerney-Riley
There was a good meme the other day: 'My mum didn't raise a quitter. She raised a complainer.' I complain about almost everything I have to do. I do it, and I do it well, but I'll complain the whole way. I am surprisingly optimistic. I feel like I've learned a lesson from taking my eyebrows off: don't [bleep] around with gas. It could have been worse. I could have blown something up properly, but all I did was lose some eyebrows. I'm going to be very careful in future because I know the consequences. The only damage was to my pride and eyebrows, and everyone got a laugh. So it's a win-win.
Richard Prideaux
I mean, if you're going to die, at least die in an anecdote, you know?
Callum McInerney-Riley
It was a bit like one of those scenes from Casualty where you know something is going to happen: rolling hills, then it cuts to a shot of Calor Gas, and suddenly someone's lighting a pizza oven.
Richard Negus
When we go to the Game Fair in a couple of weeks, we should parade Callum in front of the Moorland Association stand and say, 'This is what happens when you get a load of dead wood.' It would be a public service. Controlled burning is good; with an out-of-control wildfire, you end up looking like Callum. That's just how we operate at Countryslide: we provide a public service because the BBC can't be arsed any more. There we go.
Richard Prideaux
There we go. I think that's a good time to bring it to an end. This is the end of the main show; we'll go over to the patrons-only aftershow next. In the aftershow, I'm going to start by talking about my observations of Callum's interactions with his clients on Friday.
Richard Negus
Oh, yes.
Richard Prideaux
Thank you everyone.
Richard Negus
Goodbye. Bye.