We had Halloween to contend with this week. The eve of the Western Christian feast of All Hallows. It begins the observance of Allhallowtide, the time in the liturgical year dedicated to remembering the dead, including saints (hallows), martyrs, and all the faithful departed. In popular culture, the day has become a celebration of horror, being associated with the macabre and supernatural.

Thank me later when it comes up in the spooky pub quiz.

We carried on with the path widening and at first, I thought muggins here had miscalculated the distance between the benches. We did about 150 metres but it was hard going. We haven’t trimmed back this part for a while so the scrub was pretty dense, rather than just growth from this summer. I can let myself off a bit of self-flagellation, which I normally end up doing when I am way too optimistic about how much we can do each week.

Before and after photos and despite removing a load of scrub, it looks like we didn’t do much at all!! We still have the right-hand side to do, which puts us behind plan, but I will probably catch us up over the next day or so, to keep us on track.

Work in progress and a bit of tree release.

When we finish the path widening we’re going to come back and work behind the trees to create more of a woodland feel to the trail. We are not getting rid of all the scrub, before everyone starts hyper-ventilating with horror-stricken palpitations, we are just knocking it back to get a permanently wide path, a good wildflower-rich grassy verge, and then a scrubby understory.

Behind the scrub are a lot of eerie and dead trees. It does look very spooky, creepy and dark. Dead wood is great but for the whole area to be baron is not so good, so we need to do some thinning to let some sunlight in.

Here is our YouTube from where we left off last week, bench-to-bench.

We were working southwards today, but the overall progress is northwards, as is the video.

I visited three woodlands managed by the Woodland Trust this week, just to make sure that we are on the right track, and to kinda confirm in my own head that what I think we are working towards is actually attainable.

Here they are:

I got there before all of the leaf-peepers. That’s a term for all the people who flock to the woods to see the leaves turning golden brown, bright red and deep amber, as autumn shuffles towards winter.

Pretty impressive and worth us slowly transitioning towards. We don’t want to do it too quickly or the existing wildlife will not be able to gradually adapt. The things that stand out for me are the path widths, tree spacing, and woodland floor. It just feels so much more open.

Lastly, we enjoyed a festive mince pie and a warming coffee, in our all-terrain mugs.

Hopefully I can pull us back on track ready for next week and we can stay roughly where we need to be.

With all the recent rain, and I am expecting some sort of backlash from Storm Ciaran tomorrow, we still have the troublesome drainage problem at Berrybanks. I’m waiting for Martyn, the Sustrans Land Manager, to get back to us with ideas, but if anyone can think of a way to get the water into the drain, or some other way of dealing with it, please let me know. At the moment it’s spilling out of the input drain and flowing down the centre of the path for about 800 metres.

Just pop any ideas in the comments below.

Until next week!