A countess has had to atone for the pong after her country estate sprayed human faeces onto the fields.
Locals said the smell was like rotting fish and ammonia and stopped them from sunbathing in their gardens.
Countess Bathurst, of grade I listed Cirencester Park in Gloucestershire, the second wife of the 9th Earl Bathurst, admitted on Facebook that they had to hold their hands up to this one. The farm had been spreading biosolids on the fields, and they had to put huge nutrients back into the ground and then plough it in once spread.
The Bathurst Estate said a contractor spread treated sewage from Wessex Water on the fields near Cirencester. It was banking on the wind to take the odour away, but the wind dropped.
Resident Caroline McShane said she grew up in and around farms but added the smell that she smelt when driving through Cirencester was enough to make you vomit, a mix of rotting fish and ammonia, not a natural farming smell.
Janey Hayes said that she was born and bred there, but that this was vile.
In a statement posted on Facebook, the estate said that the spreading was organised for when there was an easterly breeze which would have taken the smell away from the town, but frustratingly the wind dropped in the night and as such the odour hung in the valleys.
And it was said that they have a tractor and cultivator working to incorporate the biosolids as quickly as possible and this would lessen the smell.
The countess, Sara Chapman, was born in Marlborough, Wiltshire and married Earl Bathurst in 1996, later becoming the High Sheriff of Gloucestershire until 2017.
She said that she started smelling the stench during her evening dog walk on Sunday and that at first, she was convinced something big had died in the hedge before realising what it was when the odour followed her all the way home.
Writing on the local Facebook page, Cirencester, a Local Town for Local People, the Countess added that she apologised for the pong and that it was a necessary yearly evil and the wind direction rather let them down.
The Bathurt’s have run the Cirencester Park estate since 1695. Reportedly worth £45 million, the estate sprawls over 15,500 acres of countryside which claims to enclose the principal source of the River Thames.
Earl Bathurst, known as Lord Apsley until his father’s demise in 2011, is a keen conservationist who has campaigned to protect the countryside and historic buildings.
We used to wonder how it was possible to get Salmonella from lettuce or cucumber, and when there were outbreaks it was baffling to think that you could get this from consuming salad, but now we see it – we’re all eating our own faecal matter.
I suppose if you do live in the countryside, you’d get used to the aroma of manure on the fields. It’s part of village life, like clamorous church bells, tractors awakening you at 7 am, cockerels crowing at sunrise, and combine harvesters working late into the night.
Of course, the aroma of farm slurry is one thing, but this human faeces is repugnant, and not the typical country odour at all.
And it appears that poo is now called biosolids, how politically correct. But is this much poo about nothing? And I wonder what the vegans will think when they find out their vegetables have been grown in meat-eaters poo?
But the majority of farmland in the United Kingdom uses biosolids nows, it’s just that the public is too disinterested in farming to understand it, and only care about getting their next meat burger and bun in their stomach when they want it.
