Bordering Area B – that grassy part of the Common beside Warren Road furthest from Lower Street – is some virtually impenetrable scrub. Scrub is of course a perfectly honourable habitat of great value to many species, but it does have the regrettable habit of trying to take over the world, with ambitions of becoming mature forest. Area B, and Area A, which as you might guess is the bit closer to Lower Street, is highly prized as a patch of grassland harbouring many really rather rare and special species too. Natural England, the organisation responsible for ensuring the proper management of SSSIs like this, has for some time been asking for that scrub to be restrained in its ambitions, and now that they have changed the timescales in which we have to do the reed cutting there is a ‘window’ for some time to be spent on rebuking the scrub.
12 volunteers convened at the appointed hour, to be treated as two teams of six. Here are some them demonstrating classic social distancing:
The job was to get from this…
To this
To that end, loppers were lopping, sawyers were sawing, and slashers were, well, you get the idea.
Slashers and loppers are all very well, but when you really want to make a difference, you call for Noel and the Brush Cutter. It must be doing some good, judging by the noise it makes.
Or a Samurai warrior maybe!!
Team Leader Julie’s special project was the building of a wall from the more substantial bits of cut willow, which appeared to have the makings of her own secret woodland hideaway. (Thank goodness no one cut down the electricity pole behind her!)
Last winter we opened up an area beyond Area B which we imaginatively named Area X. This is the haunt of monsters and demons (or at least it looks like it might be), with treacherous flooded holes awaiting the unwary. Undaunted, two plucky ladies ventured in there to remove baby Alders: we counted them out, and we counted both back, so that was alright.
Julie fell onto her hands and knees, suspiciously after imbibing something at the distanced “tea” break…
but she was hidden behind the barrier she had built, so no one knew until she owned up much later, when no re-enactment for the camera was possible. Here is the offending root over which she tripped, having carefully avoided it for an hour:
Your correspondent fell too, elegantly backwards whilst tugging on a branch requiring removal: the branch stayed put, all but the small bit at the end that remained in his hand as he gracefully went right down flat on his back. At least it was a soft landing!
We are a resourceful bunch, but self-amputation is not encouraged.
It was a more than usually musical session this time: scrub is important habitat for Nightingales to sing and nest in, and this led a few highly talented volunteers to consider that old song “A Nightingale sang in Berkeley Square”. We agreed that it is inaccurate on two counts, as no nightingales have ever been reported as being present there, and it isn’t a square anyway. We considered what it might be; a trapezium perhaps? That makes the lyrics clumsier than in the original version, but we made a creditable effort, finding that a good rhyme for trapezium is magnesium, although that was hard to connect to nightingales. Something along the lines of
“Nightingales never sang in Berkeley Trapezium
People were offered skylarks, but it’s hard to please ‘em.”
We thought that added something to the song, but others
might differ…
As the session drew to a close, a couple of Alpacas were brought along the boardwalk, clearly poetry fans (but I can’t think of a rhyme for Alpaca either).
A less than rousing chorus of “we’ll meet again” concluded the session, although it sounded to your correspondent’s ears more like “Whale meat again”, which we might be on if the lockdown lasts too long.
Here is Team Leader Julie’s message of thanks:
Dear Volunteers
This is to thank the volunteers who turned out on the Common today
to cut back the scrub on the Areas B and X on the Warren Road side of the
Common. We were lucky with the weather with only a couple of short showers and
far lower wind speeds than had been forecast earlier in the week. The
difference made by the work party was amazing. We were sawing, lopping, brush
cutting, dragging, stacking and even hand weeding! The end result is clear to see with the scrub
taken back noticeably.
Obviously, with the latest Lockdown announced this may be the last
work done on the Common for a while, but good progress has been made over the
last few months despite all the restrictions placed on us. So a huge thank you
goes to all of you who have worked so hard with us over this time.
Please stay safe and we hope to see you all again soon.
Regards,
Julie (and all the Team Leaders)
