STEP 1:  Vehicle power: At the beginning I consulted my older and wiser neighbours about the problem: “Get in a man and a digger and it’ll be clear in a day or two,” advised one. “It’ll cost mind you, but there’s no other way”. But I had seen what these machines could do. Another neighbour had recently cleared land for a new road, and in the wake of the noisy machine everything was removed, the struggling olives and oaks, the wild lavender and thyme and most sadly of all was the demolition of the old stone walling that supported the ancient terraces hidden beneath the jungle of gorse. And once the machine had upped and gone, the gorse had been left in heaps amongst soil and rock at the side of the road. This seemed a fire hazard as well as slovenly work. There had to be another way.

STEP 2: Mobile machinery: Instead of getting in a digger we borrowed a powerful petrol driven strimmer with a deadly looking blade attachment that looked like a giant Ninja’s shuriken.

After 2 hours my hands were numb with the vibration of the machine. My ears were ringing with the sound of the engine.

My entire body was sweating profusely and vibrating even though the machine was now switched off. My face mask had steamed up long ago and I could no longer make out where I was, what I was cutting down or even on whose land I had indeed been cutting.

And how efficiently was the land cleared? Looking back over the metres of ground I had cleared, the stalks of the gorse were still there where the slope of the ground had prevented me from cutting close - and everywhere there were random piles of the stuff drifting about. I would have to go back over it all with some hand tool. Then there was the noise and petrol pollution to take into account and whether my bones could cope with another 1998 shuddering hours. Overall not a very satisfactory method.

STEP 3: Back to basics: Forced to return the machine after two weeks of crazed cutting I had a convenient break to sit back and review the problem. There still remained over 99% of land untouched. Perhaps not all of it needed to be cut? Perhaps I should concentrate on just reaching the trees and releasing them from their spiny prisons? If, as I worked my way through I could change direction as and when I came across a species I wanted to keep, surely that would be a better way to proceed? But how and with what tool? Enter the long-handled cutters: Silent, light weight, no special masks, no petrol fumes or blue clothes and with these cutters you can reach right into the bush, snip from the