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Seven of what I would like to call wildlife superheroes turned out today, but we were far from doing wildlife stuff. Marcus, Ian, Reece, Martin, Steve, Matt, and Paul set about fixing our picnic bench.

The more we take these apart, the more we realise what an absolute rubbish buy they were. They are definitely designed for very occasional garden use. But hey-ho… We will not be beaten.

It ain’t perfect, but we ran out of time and just wanted to get it all screwed together so no more bits would go missing. It needs a tiny bit of TLC but it is fully functional again.

We first put these in, in September 2023 so effectively we have had 18 months use out of them. The other one is now on the Dunchurch Bridleway after we totally rebuilt the frame and turned it into a 4-seater. This one is probably 50% rebuilt frame, so it is slowly becoming more suitable for our purposes.

A pretty good morning putting our collective minds together to work out how to fix it.

Martin, Ian and Marcus headed northwards to clear a fallen tree.

We have had an incredibly generous gift from JR TREE CARE in the form of saws.

These bad boys cut wood like a hot knife through butter. Thank you so much for these, Jamie. They will make a huge difference.

We broke for coffee and flapjack at half-time.

Enjoyable conversations and lots of stuff in the pipeline. Marcus being absent from the photo is a bit of a clue…

Here is a nice message that Martin received a couple of weeks ago.

Hi Martin, hope you have been doing great this week. Joshua and I just went out for a walk near our home where you work. I saw a few cute benches there, I guess they are what you were working on the other day?

Pathway was much tidier and cleaner too. 🙂 thank you.

It’s always nice to get a bit of feedback.

Dunchurch Bridleway

I thought I was on my own this week, so I made a pack-up for just me, which consisted of, one Cumberland sausage, one egg, and one rasher of bacon.

I also brought a book that I am currently reading. It was my intention to really get some use out of the facilities that we provide, as an end user.

Dave appeared on his bike and I was cursing that I had not brought more food. I did offer to go halves on what I had, but Dave was OK, I hope…

Riddled with guilt and burdened with a deep sense of shame, I chomped through my delicious breakfast, before we carried on staining the benches and strimming the path up to the last set.

To make up for my extravagant breakfast folly for one, I felt a bit of self-flagellation was needed.

So I litter-picked the whole path, and felt the guilt instantly lift from my shoulders.

The trail is looking pretty good.

The first three hundred metres is a working bridleway that the farmer uses for access to his fields, hence the deep ruts, after that it becomes a tad narrow in places, but we have a plan in September to push it out a bit more and create glades around some of the mature trees. We like the width to be such that people can walk two abreast so they can have conversations and stuff.

Another fantastic week of us blokes bonding and eating decent food (well, me eating decent food)…

Next one is just north of the Cawston Underpass.

Until then!

Paul