The Harvest Moon

Our new circular picnic bench survived the pagan rituals of the autumn equinox over the last weekend, so we marched ahead and put in the second bench on this northern part of the path.

This week we witness the Harvest Moon. The name given to the full moon in September because it glows brightly and allows farmers to spend the night bringing the last of the harvest in, when they run out of daylight.

Here is a little-known pub-quiz fact – whilst we are talking about moons and our upcoming Harvest Moon, a Blue Moon is called such because it occurs in the same month as a regular full moon. Effectively there are two full moons in a month and the second one is called a Blue Moon and it only happens once every 33 months, hence the phrase, “once in a blue moon”. You can thank me later when you win the pub trophy.

But enough of the big round thing in the night sky as we turned our attention to the big round thing at our feet – picnic bench number 2…

Whilst we had the build from last week to draw knowledge from, so felt a lot more confident putting the thing together, we had yet another problem looming over us. Storm Agnes was rolling in at a terrific rate of knots.

The last place any of us wanted to be was surrounded by trees when there’s a 75 mile-per-hour gale blowing in.

But we cracked on and got the thing concreted into the ground and, thankfully, pretty level. Which leads us nicely on to us doing what successive UK Governments have failed to do for decades, or for ever, if you think about it. We have levelled up the north/south divide on the greenway. Many a time people have complained about the lack of picnic tables at the north end and told us that they call it the “poor end”. Well your prayers have been answered with two shiny and new picnic benches for everyone to enjoy.

Rather amusing that we are talking about our little railway line, as HS2 is in the news for all the wrong reasons!

We soon stopped for coffee and coconut macaroons whilst the conversation veered off on every tangent possible.

Our YouTube of the area.

You can see from the last photo how deep the cutting is here. After topping up on our caffeine-rich go-go juice, we set about easing back the tree cover to ensure the bench gets loads of sunlight. It’s gonna be little-and-often to keep the tree-canopy open.

Next week we are back at Berrybanks widening the path and trying to get to the bottom of the culvert that is constantly overflowing. We widened the path from the underpass earlier in the year, so it would be nice to connect to where we left off in January and get the whole section between the underpass and Berrybanks a good three metres wide.

In other news, I have spend a good few hours trawling over the planning documents for the new warehouses up at the Dunchurch Bridleway. I can confirm that the Right-of-Way that runs off the bridleway and connects to the greenway, is staying and is being re-routed between two of the warehouses. I will start clearing out the bridleway ready for when the link is back working again.

And lastly, we have some new graffiti…