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Seven of us (Marcus, Reece, Ian, Martin, Steve, Matt, and Paul) turned out this sunny morning and swapped our wildlife hero cloaks for checked shirts.

We’ve had a few trees come down, and of course, there is never a clean fall. They get tangled up in other trees and have that look of “if so much as a butterfly lands on me, I’m gonna drop!” about them.

Crazy people still walk under them, so we have to roll up our sleeves and pretend to be lumberjacks. Which is great fun at the start but soon becomes incredibly hard work.

The good thing about there being so many of us is that if we each do five minutes on the saw, then that equates to 35 minutes of constant sawing.

We eventually made the dangling trees safe and pushed what timber we could into the margins to keep the path clear, and allow the cut wood to slowly become host to literally hundreds of thousands of insects, as it slowly rots down over the next ten years or so.

Is this the start of an assault course? When the roots rot off, we might be able to swing it around by 90 degrees. Today was not the day to try and shift it.

After all of that exercise, we broke off for a decent pick-me-up of coffee, bacon rolls, and good company.

It’s the first workday of the month, so we rolled out the portable stove, and got the bacon sizzling away as we set up camp at one of our triangles of benches, that are designed for people to sit at and have a relaxed conversation.

The bacon did brown up a bit more than in the photo, but I was too busy stuffing my face and slurping my coffee to bother about taking pictures.

We also tried to create shafts of sunlight down the bank.

It’s getting to the top of the cutting and knocking back anything that is going to block out the sunshine. It creates dappled pools of light on the opposite side of the path so wildflowers will grow and we just have a bit of variety.

We did a litter pick here and also on the westerly end of the Dunchurch Bridleway.

The Dunchurch Bridleway has a lot of litter blowing about from the building site next to it. Cawston not so much.

Our YouTube of the bridge.

Our Geocaching Trail on the Dunchurch bit has been taken over by Andrew so I look forward to seeing that restored back to a decent bit of fun for friends and families to enjoy.

We have completed our 8 circular routes starting at 1 km and finishing at 10 km, all from The Bear Pub, so please go in and enjoy a pint or bite to eat if you can.

All of these trails can be found by clicking on the AllTrails tab on the menu above.

It’s so good to get out and connect with nature.

Next week, we are at the Potford Dam end, and the week after we are at the most northerly end trying to let a lot of light in and get it a bit drier.

And that is about it as we trudged back up the steps and reconnected with the real world.

As the adventure ended for another week, we couldn’t help but admire the habitat pile made by the guys from Jaguar Landrover on their corporate volunteering day.

Friday is on the Dunchurch Bridleway back at the easterly end.

Thanks for reading if you got this far.

Until next time!

Paul