YESTERDAY I drove from Littledean through Soudley, along the Roman Road, through Parkend and up into Bream.

From beyond Soudley ponds I noticed that the turf all along the sides of the road here and there showed signs of being turned over during the last few days. Of course, it could have been by badgers, but my experience of working with and around pigs over the last 60 odd years points to pigs as the culprits.

A little while ago a neighbour of mine told me that he encountered six half grown boar outside my back gate where we have oak trees shedding their acorns.

Two years ago a white sow which looked a bit like a Landrace x Lop-ear breed walked up our road, accompanied by eight young striped piglets. This makes me believe that there is some domestic pig inbred into the wild boar community. This may account of the apparent lack of shyness and willingness to come to humans for food.

Pigs are no different to cows and poultry at feed times. How many times have you seen a herd of cows stood by a gate at milking time? It's the tasty cake they are after.

Our hens at home when I was a child always waited in a group by their pen gate for their late afternoon feed of corn.

Pigs have played a huge part in the well being of Forest folk over hundreds of years. How many incomers, on buying an old cottage, have found a lovely little house with a pan-tiled roof either at the bottom of the garden or in the middle of an orchard? This, of course, was Mrs Pig's house or if you like, next year's meat for the family.

The old people weren't daft either. They never ate pig meat unless there was an R in the month.Pig meat goes off quickly, and there were no freezers.

My grandfather, a miner and stockholder, who ran pigs, sheep and poultry on the Forest, built a new house in 1902. My father, born in that year, said "The only pictures on the walls were sides of cureing bacon."

At Nedstop Farm, Oldcroft, the furniture in the front room of my aunt and uncle's farm house in the 1930s and 40s was two huge stone slabs on which lay sides of bacon which were regularly salted and turned.

The soap used to wash with was cut off an old piece of pig meat turned to soap.

Pigs were routinely let onto the Forest to forage. It is called pannage, where they eat acorns, chestnuts and anything else edible to them.

The bylaws of the Forest insisted that to stop a pig ripping up the turf they had to be 'rung.' Rings, metal ones, sometimes as many as five or six, were put across the top of the snout. It seemed to work in most cases. The laughable side was that often a sow, rung in accordance with the law, could be seen walking across a green followed by six or eight, six to 8-week old piglets who were rooting like mad with their little snouts unrung.

Just who is responsible for ringing the present rooters or have the byelaws been rescinded?

Let's be fair – the powers-that-be over the centuries haven't been very good at controlling our pests have they?

At least the sheep badgers usually know where their sheep are and can retrieve them quickly.

Poultry was always locked away from the fox at night and when a man wanted his pigs home before dark, all that he had to do was fill the trough with food, bang the bucket, shout 'Pig, pig,' and stand back or else he could be knocked over in the rush!

A thousand years ago I suspect, perhaps a king and his merry men would thunder out of St Briavels Castle on horseback to hunt the boar and deer. The boar, of course, were not as quick as deer, so were consumed at feasts after hunts, battles and weddings, so then there were none. The deer survived and woe betide any commoners who killed one. In the 1830s records show that an ancestor of mine spent six months in Gloucester Prison on hard labour for killing one. Lucky not to be hung I suppose. The deer survive but wait until our food supply dries up!

No-one says much about our furry friend the grey squirrel these days, despite the damage they inflict on our Forest. They do untold damage to trees by stripping the bark off branches, taking the tasty growing tips of young trees and stealing the eggs of birds.

In the 1940s and 50s the Forestry Commission paid 9 pence for a squirrel tail – not bad money at the time. But squirrels took some shooting. Since those days the Commission has tried trapping and poisoning, and motorists have tried hard to help by killing a few on the roads, but all to no avail.

On some good or bad days, whichever way you look at it, I can have as many as six at a time feeding with the birds in my garden when there is not so much food in the woods around.

I note an article in another paper about my old workplace in the 40s-50s, Priors Mesne, Aylburton, which in recent years has been turned into a deer park. It was previously a farm with cows, pigs and poultry and a market garden.

TB has been found in the deer on such a scale that it has been felt wise to cull the whole herd. How sad if our wild deer are carrying TB along with badgers throughout the countryside!

Anyway, back to our new friends the boars.

Who, in this our Olympic year, and our Queen's Jubilee year, when by all accounts we are expecting millions of visitors to our shores, is going to tidy up our roadside verges, and who is going to be prosecuted for allowing pigs onto the Forest without being rung?

Come on county council and Forestry Commission.?Sort it out!

– C.R. Miles,?Bream.