I?AM?at home in Bream. It is pouring down. This is wonderful. A couple of days it was warm and sunny. A chance to whip around with the mower, but the stench drove me back indoors. It was not just our usual farm smells. This time it was supplemented by a large number of free-range sheep.

The downpour will provide a respite, washing the muck off the roads and pavements and out of the atmosphere. Apart from one man who is paid by the parish council to sweep round the area of the village school. I have not in the last 30 years, observed any street cleaning by the district council.

When I was a district councillor myself I recall being briefed by the officer in charge. He grades the cleanliness of every road and lane and found them all satisfactory. When I challenged him he agreed Bream was a bit neglected and offered to walk round with me. Unfortunately I was taken bad, unable to walk for a while and I did not stand for re-election.

But we did rejoice that the sheep appeared to be kept out of the village. The trouble now is that New Zealand which used to export to us vast quantities of the tastiest lamb now re-directs it to China a bigger, better and nearer market where prosperity provides a new taste for meat.

In the UK the price has soared and the sheep nuisance has returned with a vengeance. Last week I had two ewes scouting in my back garden, muck outside my gate; people complaining "just like the old times".

The blame must lie with the Forestry Commission in setting up a Commoners' Association which supports the handful of people who treat our streets like farmyards.

There is no common, there are no common rights, and the law is being broken. I recall a conversation with a senior forestry officer at Bank House. I said I was annoyed at having to keep my dog on a lead in the woodlands to stop him chasing sheep. He said "could you rent the dog to us? I don't know anywhere in the Forest where sheep are not both sides of our wires."

The trouble was any strong action led to criminal damage. So a new Deputy Surveyor sought co-operation by setting up this "commoners" association and negotiating an agreement with them. He persuaded the heads of all the departments in the local government and they signed their agreement to support it. An impressive ceremony with bugles, and speeches was held and recorded at Speech House by Radio Gloucester. Sadly it contained no mechanism for enforcement. The next day sheep were back fouling Bream High Street and jumping into gardens. One even managed to invade the pharmacy. The agreement was not worth the paper it was written on.

For years there was trouble: criminal damage, punch ups, surveys, debates, Asbos, a bucket of sheep droppings spread around the Bank House car park, and a bunch of sheep kidnapped and liberated near Abergavenny (but returned). Finally the district council took the Forestry Commission to court. A new agreement was endorsed by the judge and it contained an enforceable procedure backed by the court to keep the sheep out of the villages. It cost taxpayers £110,000.

But the representatives of the Commoners' Association refused to cooperate. A fellow councillor turned on the television set in his hotel room in Nairobi and picked up the world service. There was I leaning on my gate giving a press conference filming sheep dodging between cars in the Parkend road, not far from his house in the Forest!

I see a great way out. I was a governor at the Forest College when it first got into financial trouble (in fact I was the first on the board to spot this). The trouble is that for further education colleges to work they must have many courses and many lecturers to run them and this means lots of students which we were not attracting. We had to make the equivalent of 30 teachers redundant and that made the situation worse. It was a happy, successful college, but needed, and for a time received, financial props. It is now in crisis and may be swallowed up by Gloucester. We also have lots of young people unemployed through no fault of their own and looking for work.

I suggest investment in and the addition of a 'Faculty of Sheep Management' at the college. This to be financed by taking over some 30,000 acres of Forestry Commission plantations locally. Due to monoculture the conifers which are planted very close together are suffering attacks from virulent viruses and should be felled and sold. At least half the acreage of the Forest could then be devoted to sheep of different breeds so that the students can learn the latest techniques in managing them under the best tutors.

Old oak woodlands and their bluebells, provisions for walkers, cyclists, horse riders, free miners should co-exist and of course Forest of Dean lamb would be marketed far more profitably than the softwoods.

When I was on the district council I discovered we had financial reserves of around £6 million pounds. No one knew what it was for. Normally it was invested in an Iceland bank which went bust but the officer forgot to renew the arrangement. Possibly this could be used to help students with fees, and travel and maintenance allowances if the profits from the sheep were insufficient. The government would probably be supportive and claim the idea as their own. The students would have a career, the Forest would be saved, likewise the College, and secure pounds would be created for the rogue sheep.

– Roger Horsfield, Bream.