It was a bit of a soggy one today, both with the rain, and the huge amount of standing water underfoot.

But five of us turned out (Ian, Dave, Tim, Steve, and Paul) despite the rotten weather.

We desperately need to cut the vegetation right back and clear the slightly higher ground. The wider it is the more light gets in and it will dry out. However, our first priority was to fix our broken picnic bench.

I think this was basic wear-and-tear and an awful design, rather than any naughty squirrel damage.

We flipped it over and tried to identify the weak points.

It’s now pretty solid and ready for a decently dry day so we can stain it all the same colour and hopefully get a few more years service out of it.

We broke for coffee but didn’t go for bacon rolls. It was just too wet to start trying to cook stuff on the camping stove, so we will see how the weather looks next week.

After our break we tried to make head or tail of the flooding. There is a blockage somewhere so we are trying to get the water to pool into a holding area and slowly drain away via some new piping that we put in early last year.

Dealing with this is like trying to herd cats. The water will not go where we want it to go. But we started to see it drain away towards the end of the session. We got a pretty good idea of what we need to do so we are back here next week to see what magic we can conjure up.

I did a litter pick at some point over the Chrimbo Limbo period and found a dumped shopping cart from the local shop!!

I reported it so hopefully it will get collected and put back into service.

I also found some wood that was used as packing and would’ve been thrown away.

I made a pair of benches that we are going to place opposite each other on the Dunchurch Bridleway. Hopefully, this will encourage people to sit facing each other and chat. It’s all good for mental wellbeing.

Dave very kindly bought us 10 “buy-me-a-coffee” coffees (link on the sidebar) so I added a small amount to it and we now have more power.

That’s 60 minutes extra strimming time. Thank you so much, Dave.

Lastly, I have added a new tab on the menu bar.

This is a series of circular walks starting and finishing at The Bear Pub. The first one is just 1.1 km and each trail gets longer and longer. I still have a few to do to complete the set, but it’s getting there.

Dunchurch Bridleway

We did a bit of work on this just before Christmas with the priority being to get the 2 km loop to the Solstice Coffee Shop clear, and push on westwards along the actual bridleway.

We added a bit of a French flavour to our break with some very tasty biscuits.

It was very nice to see a few people using the path as we worked.

The next one on here will be Friday 10th Jan putting in the pair of benches.

Next one on the Cawston bit will be next Wednesday back at Berrybanks.

Until then!

Paul