Mole Declines to Apologise for Lawn, Calls the Hills Surplus Earth

Residents of Orchard Close woke on Sunday to a calm, sunny morning and nine neat heaps of fresh earth on the lawn of number six. The lawn, which is mown in stripes and has twice been highly commended at the village show, was otherwise untouched. By half past eight a small crowd in dressing gowns had gathered at the hedge, holding mugs of tea and counting.

The mole responsible agreed to make a statement, on condition that it could be given from just below the surface. Speaking through the newest heap, he confirmed that the hills were his and said he saw no reason to apologise. The earth, he explained, had been in the way. It had to go somewhere. Up was the only direction that was not already full of earth.

He went on to reject the word damage. What the public was looking at, he said, was the visible part of a large and well-run building project, made up of a main corridor, several side passages and a comfortable chamber lined with dry grass. He added that he had never seen the lawn himself and so could not comment on the stripes, but he had heard good things about them from above.

Asked why the work had to be carried out at night and without warning, the mole said that he keeps his own timetable, working and resting in shifts around the clock, and that from where he lives the difference between Saturday evening and Sunday morning is not very noticeable. He regretted that the ninth hill had come up in the exact centre of the lawn. This, he said, was not a comment on anything. It was simply where the corridor was.

The owner of the lawn, reached at the hedge, said he had no quarrel with moles in general. A neighbour pointed out that the soil in the heaps was very fine and crumbly, and asked whether she might have a bucketful for her seed trays. The mole said she was welcome to all of it, as he had finished with it. By lunchtime the heaps were gone, the neighbour had three full buckets, and a tenth hill had appeared beside the bird bath.

The real idea behind it

A molehill is exactly what the mole said it was: leftover earth. Moles do not eat grass or roots and have no interest in lawns. They dig networks of tunnels with their broad, spade-like front paws, and when the loosened earth has nowhere else to go, they push it up a short shaft to the surface. The hill is the wheelbarrow load left beside a building site. The tunnels are the point: earthworms and other small creatures drop into them, and the mole walks its corridors collecting dinner.

Gardeners have long had mixed feelings about this. The heaps spoil a smooth lawn, but the earth in them has been dug from below and broken up finely, and many gardeners scoop it up for pots and seed trays, just as the neighbour did. It is a small reminder that much of what looks like mischief in a garden is somebody else getting on with their work. A mole may never see the lawn at all. It only knows that the digging is good, the worms are plentiful and the earth, regrettably, has to go somewhere.