This week we blast towards the Hunter’s Moon, so called because October is the month where humans and animals alike, stock up for winter. Squirrels hide their nuts, deer fatten up for the long cold months ahead and humans hunt for their woolly jumpers from their bottom drawer. In ancient times it would be the humans hunting the deer and storing that meat by covering it in salt and wrapping it up, or placing it in barrels full of water to create a brine. Vegetables were pickled in brine or vinegar to preserve them for a season or two. It must have been a very salty diet, indeed.

We continued with our path widening and young tree removal. We need light to get to the floor to create ground-cover for birds and small mammals to forage and hunt. I have gone over my old notes that I made with David, the Ecologist from Sustrans (the land owners) and he suggests coppicing 10% of the mature trees every year, on a rotational basis. This is not killing the trees, they will grow back over time. What it does though, is it keeps the tree canopy at different heights and stages, and helps the remaining trees to reach their full potential and allows the woodland floor to develop properly for greater biodiversity.

We’ve got about 500 metres left before the path naturally widens and sort of takes care of itself. We then have the bit between the underpass, through to Berrybanks and on to the Bear pub bridge, which is about 550 metres. With a fair wind behind us, we should have all the path widening done before Christmas. We can then spend January and February creating scallops so we have micro-habitats along the trail.

Here are a couple of YouTube vids showing our progress over the last three weeks.

We are kinda on plan, even though I tend to be wildly over-optimistic about how much we can get done each week, and somehow we need to re-stain the benches before winter, so that is quietly gnawing away at the back of my mind…

My feeling is that we need to bust-a-gut trying to keep the path at this width over the spring and summer of next year. At the moment it really feels like groundhog day and we never seem to have time to do the coppicing and other stuff, because half of the cutting back season is spend going over the same ground every year.

Anyhow, we broke off for a pick-me-up coffee in our all-terrain mugs and this week, I thought I would mix up the biscuit offering with some ginger crunch cookies. They went down a little too well.

We also strimmed around the benches with the less powerful electric strimmer and did a litter-pick up to the Cawston Bridleway bridge.

We need to be able to move on with nothing outstanding on the path behind us. Just keep ploughing forwards.

In other news, we had a person from a new country in Africa viewing the blog. Mauritania, which is totally new to me, is on the western side of Africa and is kinda south of the Sahara Desert.

Hello, person from Mauritania and thank-you for taking the time to read the blog.

Well that’s about it for this week. Next week we are at the birdfeeder clearing working south to pick up where we got to today, and then pushing northwards clearing off the higher ballast ridge, before the rain starts and the middle of the path turns into a mud-bath.

Until then!