That’s as many seasons as The X Factor, the crazy talent show that discovered artists and bands such as Olly Murs, Leona Lewis, JLS, Little Mix and One Direction, to name but a few.

Our quest for World Domination continues with the second least densely populated country in the world tuning in and taking a look – Formerly Outer Mongolia, but now just called Mongolia since the bit called Inner Mongolia became part of China. Who would have thought that someone sitting in a yurt, on a snow-covered plain, with wild horses grazing outside and a pot of coffee brewing in the corner, would happen upon this blog.

It amazes me every time a new country finds us. It’s so humbling and awe-inspiring at the same time. That’s 125 now. WOW!!

This week we had George, who is starting his Duke of Edinburgh Silver Award, join us. He will be creating a clearing in between the wildflower clearing that Charlie did for his DofE last year, and the little bench where the snowdrops come up. The bench has been made by Andrew and is ready to be assembled and concreted into place, as soon as George has made a decent clearing for it. It will have good views across the heath and nice wildflowers for nectar loving insects. Andrew also supplied a bird-box so a few rungs in the food-chain will be created in this exciting little micro-habitat.

I’m looking forward to watching this develop over the next six months.

Today the six of us marched onwards with the path widening. We seem to be having storm after storm after storm at the moment. This week it was Storm Henk, but somehow, we remained dry. It started to rain just as we finished.

The worst of it was Tuesday with heavy flooding just about everywhere.

We made good progress and are not too far off the huge lake that we somehow need to navigate.

We do love a challenge. I’m thinking of a pontoon bridge but seeing as we are not allowed to build anything where people might slip, hurt themselves, and then try to sue us, we will somehow have to route the path around it.

The more footfall that we have, the more permanent the path will become. We can see it starting to form already.

We broke off for coffee and biscuits, that were kindly supplied by Andrew. They proved a little too moreish.

And we also collected a load of litter that we keep finding as we cut the vegetation back.

After a lot of digging around, I finally found the source of our new river.

The balancing pond from the new bit of the housing estate has a culvert that flows out into the brook that is supposed to go under the railway path. The culvert that goes under the path is tiny in comparison, so simply cannot cope with the volume of water coming in after the stormy weather of late.

It will probably dry up at some point, if it ever stops raining.

Until next week!