Two very different subjects have been on my mind over the last couple of weeks.

Firstly, the late spring/early summer over the last few years has seen me most mornings firmly engaged in my (enforced) hobby of pulling Ragwort from the ground. This has seemed a never-ending task as the yellow pest appears able to spring from nothing to six inches tall overnight and so every day in the right weather conditions seems to bring new plants.

However, this year in our immediate locality there has been a marked reduction in the hours I have needed to devote to this tug-of-war game. The next door fields have been managed in exactly the same way, and our fields have had no different treatment but the amount of Ragwort growing has been considerably less than in recent years.

People wiser than me have put this down to the weather pattern this year which has not produced the weed’s favourite growing conditions. In contrast, parts of one field have turned an interesting blue/purple colour which upon investigation has been found to be an influx of heather. It seems that the (not unattractive) plant has made its way out of a garden in the village and taken rather a liking to a particular field corner.

So, just when I thought the plant pulling had eased, I spent another couple of therapeutic hours pulling up heather in order to arrest its spread for next year.

The second thing on my mind has also been a change in population numbers of a species. This was sparked by the erratic behaviour of one of our younger dogs a few weeks ago who rather than returning swiftly to the house after the evening walk decided to stand in a pitch-black corner of the garden barking furiously at the hedgerow.

The normally calm and sensible four-year-old was clearly very agitated to the extent that I took the rare decision to reach for a torch and investigate properly what, or who, was upsetting her.

Steeling myself to have to deal with an intruder, I was mightily relieved, and pleasantly surprised, to see the foolish dog barking and shivering with fear at a curled up hedgehog. After scolding the dog and returning inside I started thinking about the last time I had seen a live hedgehog or even, for that matter, a dead one.

After several minutes thought I came to the (frightening) conclusion that I had not seen a live hedgehog for more than 10 years, and that it had been at least four or five since I had seen a roadside casualty near home.

A couple of days later I saw a sadly squashed hedgehog on the roadside within a couple of miles of home. I put this apparent possible resurgence in numbers locally down to good fortune and thought no more of it until reading an article in one of the conservation and sporting magazines which reported a rise in hedgehog numbers in another part of the country.

It may be just a coincidence and I am certainly not yet celebrating the return of the hedgehog nationally but I hope could this be the start of a resurgence of one of our most fascinating native creatures.