Seriously, this was a question a member of the public asked us a while back. We do normally wear green T-shirts and camouflage patterned trousers, but mine are from Sainsbury’s (that’s a huge supermarket chain for my international followers) and definitely not army issue. And we were certainly not on training manoeuvres…

If it’s not the army, it’s Community Service – this is what you get when the courts find you guilty of a crime, but deem it not worthy of a custodial sentence. Instead you are required to do a number of hours of unpaid work in the community. Probably what everyone will now be doing, since the news that all the jails in the UK are full!!

And if people don’t assume the first two things above, they probably think that we are a group of happy-clappy tree-huggers. Whilst we must love nature and being out in it, I don’t really see ourselves like this. We started out focussed on just making the disused railway trail into a usable path. The nature bit sort of grew on us over time, and with our dearly departed friend, Mick, slowly guiding the ship in that general direction, whilst our main thrust was “a path for everyone”.

Before we start on today’s adventure, I just want to share a photo of a similar path up near Walsall. It has a lot of support and guidance from Sustrans (the land owners).

It could very easily be our path, but it isn’t. What it shows is how wide the path ideally needs to be. You can follow their progress at:-

http://www.facebook.com/SupportBackTheTrack.

So without further ado, we set about widening our path to the tree-line. We need it to be wide so walkers and cyclists can use the thing in harmony, and people have a good sight ahead of them so they don’t feel like the Cawston bogeyman is about to jump out.

This is photos of up and down before we started, mid-point, and at the end. We all agreed that it looks way better.

I did a YouTube of it and what needs doing next week to carry it on.

Once we have the path cleared we can then work on the overhang and also scallop the scrub behind the trees to encourage wildflowers to grow. We can keep any new nettle and bramble growth at bay using the lightweight battery strimmer across the summer next year.

We took advice from the Woodland Trust who said that we need to be ‘halo thinning’ around good quality trees so that we don’t have loads of saplings all competing for the same water, nutrients and light. We also need a varied tree canopy so loads of light gets through to the ground.

After our rather intense morning of work whilst Storm Babet lashed unmercifully around us, we eventually broke-off for coffee and cookies.

We seem to be having storm after storm. Last week a huge branch came down and narrowly missed squishing our Christmas tree by a whisker… One might suggest that an angel was sitting on the top of that tree and willed the falling branch slightly to the left…

We have two new countries tuning in this week. Luxemburg and Albania. I do a lot of work searching for blogs in a specific area, reading the posts and leaving a nice comment if I found the blog interesting. It’s always nice when fellow bloggers reciprocate.

Our flag count is now at 119 out of 195 countries (61%) so very happy with that. Some countries are proving extremely difficult to crack. Mongolia, that bit around Iran, and Central Africa being a bit of a blot on the map, but I keep plugging away.

Amazingly, there are only eight countries left in Europe to capture. Belarus, Latvia, Estonia, Montenegro, Andorra, Monaco, San Marino and Holy See.

Holy See is the smallest country in Europe and the World, being the Vatican City and is 0.17 square miles in size. Holy See comes from the Latin “seat”. Thank me later when you win the pub quiz.

Lastly, I litter-picked the whole path over the last weekend.

It’s looking good…

Until next week!