One way in, one way out, a barrier on each with its own loop and its own counter. Over a season the out counter finishes ahead of the in counter by nine, and it has been nine every year since 2017.
I have run a ninety pitch site for nineteen years, the last nine of them with a barrier system, and I want to start with why a barrier exists on a site like this.
Not theft. It is so that the number of vehicles on the field matches the number on the booking sheet, because the fire officer asks, and because a field with more cars on it than pitches is a field where somebody has brought a second car and not paid for it.
There are two barriers. In and out, eleven metres apart, on the only track off the lane. A hedge runs the whole boundary with a ditch behind it, and the only other gap is a field gate into the farmer's land which is padlocked and which I check because the padlock is mine.
Each barrier has an inductive loop in the track. A loop senses metal above it, which is how the barrier knows a vehicle is there and when it has cleared, and the controller counts every one.
Two counters. In and out. Over a season they should finish equal, because every car that comes onto a campsite eventually leaves it.
Mine finish nine apart.
Out is ahead. Nine more vehicles have left the site than arrived on it, every season, since the system went in in 2017.
Nine in 2017. Nine in 2018. Nine in 2019. Nothing in 2020 because we were shut. Nine in 2021, 2022, 2023, 2024 and last year.
I need to say clearly what I checked first, because it is the thing everybody says.
Reversing. If a car comes up to the out barrier and changes its mind and reverses, you can get a double count. That is real and it happens, and it shows up in the log as two events a few seconds apart at the same barrier, which is a pattern I can search for.
There are eleven of those across eight seasons and I have taken them out of the figures. Nine is the number after that.
The other answer is the loop miscounting a trailer or a caravan. A long vehicle can break into two counts if the loop is badly set, and an outfit with a gap between the car and the van is exactly how that happens. So the loops were re-tuned in 2018 by the manufacturer's engineer, who also set the hold times, and who told me my site was the cleanest install he had been to that year, which I have thought about a lot since.
Nine before the re-tune. Nine after.
The counters are also not the only record, and this is why I cannot let it go.
Every booking is a vehicle registration, because the pitch fee includes one car and a second car is twelve pounds. Over a season I take between two and three thousand bookings and every one has a plate on it.
And there is a camera on the out barrier, not ANPR, just a camera, recording to a box with a fortnight of storage, put in after somebody took a picnic bench in 2019.
So I have three records: two counters, a booking list with plates, and a fortnight of footage at a time.
The bookings and the in counter agree to within about twenty over a season, which is the honest error rate of a man with a clipboard in August.
The out counter is nine more than both of them.
In 2022 I tried to catch one.
The counters are on a panel in the office and they increment live, and I can see the difference between them at any moment, and what I worked out that season is that the difference does not creep. It steps.
Eight of the nine happen in one night.
Not the same night. But in each of the eight seasons there is one night where the difference goes from about one to about nine between ten in the evening and six in the morning, and the other one turns up somewhere across the rest of the season on its own.
So in 2022 I sat in the office on nine separate nights, the ones I thought most likely, with the kettle and a radio and the panel in front of me.
I did not see it. I saw perhaps forty ordinary vehicles leave and the counter went up by forty.
It happened that season on the eleventh of August, which was a night I was asleep in the house, and the difference was eight by the morning.
What the footage has.
The eleventh of August 2022 is inside a fortnight and I pulled it the same day.
The out barrier lifts eight times between 01:14 and 01:52, at intervals of four to seven minutes.
Each time, the barrier lifts, stays up for about eleven seconds, which is what it does for a vehicle clearing the loop, and comes down.
The track is empty in all eight.
Not dark. There is a lamp on the post and the track is lit and the hedge behind it is lit and you can see the gravel and the white line, and the barrier goes up and waits and comes down, eight times, over thirty eight minutes, with nothing going under it.
A loop that triggers with nothing on it is a known fault. It is called a false call and it comes from water in the slot, a broken cable, or interference, and every engineer I have described this to has said those words to me before I have finished the sentence.
So: the loop was dug up and replaced in 2023. New slot, new loop, new feeder, new detector card, and a different controller in 2024 from a different manufacturer.
2023: nine. 2024: nine. Last year: nine.
And a false call does not explain the rest of it, which is that the barrier lifts. A false call on the loop tells the controller a vehicle is waiting, and on my system a waiting vehicle at the out barrier lifts it, so that part is consistent.
What is not consistent is that the loop also reports the vehicle CLEARING. The barrier comes down when the loop goes clear, and the log records a completed transit, which needs the loop to make and then break. Eight times, in a sequence, at walking-out-of-a-field intervals, on a lit empty track.
I have stopped reporting it and I have stopped paying to fix it, and what I do instead is add nine.
The fire officer gets a figure for maximum vehicles on site and that figure comes from the in counter, which is the honest one, and nothing I have described affects it. Nobody is at risk and nothing is unsafe and I have turned that sentence over for eight years looking for the hole in it.
The only thing I do that I cannot justify is in the spring, when I walk the boundary before the season, which I have always done for the hedge and the ditch.
I count the gaps. There are none, and there have never been any, and the padlock on the farmer's gate is mine and it is shut.
And I stand at the out barrier for a bit on the way back up, because it is the last thing on the walk and the view down the lane is nice, and I have got into the habit of lifting it by hand and letting it down again, which takes about eleven seconds, and which I could not explain to anybody who asked.