This week we have another full moon to contend with. It’s called the Flower Moon because it coincides with an abundance of flowers finally bursting into life as we see out the last few weeks of spring, and welcome summer.

However, somebody up there in the clouds obviously didn’t get the memo.

It just rained, and rained, and rained. It was that horribly wet rain that seeps into every space that it can find. It was getting down my neck and soaking my back, into my shoes and soaking my feet, and brushing past the overgrown path drenched my trousers.

But four of us intrepid explorers made it today and battled on.

The first task was to cut back the annoying path that gave my trousers a soaking.

This is the Cawston Bridleway and not even part of our trail, but I thought a good deed was in order.

We covered about 500 metres today and it really is just taking 6 or so inches off the edge of the path to stop all the vegetation making a mad dash for the open space. It’s easy work because everything is new growth so there are no hardened woody stems on anything. However, the constant vibration from the strimmers is quite tiring on the arms and hands.

Just look how wet it is.

And here we can see how the narrow path just opens up a bit.

We had shelter under the Bridleway bridge for a well needed caffeine-boost in our all-terrain mugs, but no bench.

So we improvised with an umbrella from one of our sponsors. We went back to the small flask because I was sure that nobody was going to join us today. Indeed, only one person came past, in the whole time that we were down there.

Luckily, I took some photos on Monday, of what we did last week.

We can see the path.

The short-grass buffer.

The wildflower zone.

And the interesting grasses that are starting to flourish.

There are some lovely grass names including Crested Dogstail, Tall Fescue, Creeping Bent, Meadow Foxtail, Timothy, and Yorkshire Fog.

I look forward to getting on my hands and knees to identify what we have, but overall I hope you can see the method in our madness in terms of path – short edge – wildflower-rich grass – scrub and trees.

I still feel that we need to push the scrub back even further by creating deep scallops into it. It’s all about getting a balance for people to share the path, wildlife to thrive, and for it to look pleasing on the eye. By having the scrub right up to the edge of the path means we lose this wildflower bit and it becomes very mono-green.

Here is our YouTube of most of the work today.

Welcome to British weather. I hate to think what is happening at the Berrybanks end!!

Lastly, we litter-picked from the middle-point, all the way to the southern end.

Next week we are at the Jaguar Land Rover bench pushing on. Please feel free to join us for coffee at 11am if you need a bit of human interaction, or are simply interested in what we are doing.

The benches for the Dunchurch Bridleway are almost ready and we have the buy-me-a-coffee donation from Rich for the replacement bench set-up near The Bear bridge. Hopefully we are looking at early June for installation of both of these.

That’s it for this week!

Paul