Oh no!! It rained on St. Swithin’s Day (15th July) – According to the old saying, if it rains on St. Swithin’s Day it will rain for the next 40 days. If St. Swithin’s Day is dry, the next 40 days will also be dry.

Thankfully, today was blisteringly hot with not a drop of rain. Stick that in your pipe and smoke it, St. Swithin…

Five of us met at the quadrant and pushed southwards to the Bethel bench and then northwards to Berrybanks.

Views up, down and to the sides. I carried on southwards to the Potford Dam end just snipping back bramble runners. It was like the triffids were taking over…

After a near death battle I managed to get back for coffee and nibbles and then caught up with the expedition northbound.

Our underpass wildflower clearing is doing well.

Sadly, the next wildflower clearing is a bit grass-heavy and looks a bit tatty. Nothing we can do until autumn when we can clear it out and re-sow it ready for next year.

The path is nice and wide with loads of dappled sunlight and quite a few butterflies, damselflies and bees flying about.

Our YouTube of a bit of the progress today.

Dunchurch Bridleway

We had our fortnightly workday last Friday where Dave and me pushed on with another 200 metres or so.

We really are deep into the countryside here and it feels really good for the soul to be surrounded by fields full of crops and to be opening up this ancient bridleway. One cannot help but stop and wonder why it is here and what was its purpose? And of course, how many people through the last few hundreds, if not thousands of years have trudged up and down it.

Notice the new Land Rover mug – which reminds me, we have another team coming from Jaguar Land Rover for a Community Volunteer Day in September.

We opened up the first looping path that starts from the little brown bench, that was part of a stile, that we rescued last week.

It’s a rather nice 1.3 km circular walk that crosses a field full of barley (so I am told) and then wheat. At the 1 km point there are stiles with paths off that go through the woods to the villages of Cawston and Bilton.

The next challenge is to get to the Solstice coffee shop. We have 630 metres left to clear and will create a 2 km circular walk.

By the time we have this done, I reckon we will be towards the end of August and the bird-nesting season will be over. We can then start pushing on to connect with Cawston Greenway and really push back the scrub on the looping paths a good metre or so to create the wildflower-rich strip between path and bramble.

We decided that we would go ahead with the triangle of benches behind the school.

It’s a popular access point so will get a lot of use and is open for the school to use for Forest School if they want. We have £20 worth of buy-me-a-coffee donations, The cost of three benches is £27 and three bags of Postcrete is £21 so it would be nice if we can have a few more people donating towards this.

That’s about it for this week.

Next week we are at Berrybanks.

Paul