Seven of us turned out today for our weekly dopamine hit. Marcus, Reece, Mark, Ian, Martin, Matt, and Paul, and we had just today to finish the work on this first section (see September Jobs tab).

600 metres of 3,500 metres in total. It has all been about thinning the trees and breaking up the canopy to get dappled sunlight into the understory.

We, quite literally, have absolute pools of glorious sunlight hitting the floor. This is going to add so much biodiversity next year with grass and wildflowers popping up all over.

I have to admit, it’s been a tough first four weeks of the cutting-back season. This section has been left because it sort of looked after itself, and we never really had the manpower to justify spending too much time down here.

We have had a noticeable uptick in traffic and loads of comments about how wide, open, bright, and nice it now is.

A definite pat on the back earned for all of us.

We lugged a huge tree trunk to the side of the path before enjoying coffee and biscuits.

This will take years and years to slowly rot down, and provide habitat for so many insects, and small mammals that will burrow underneath it.

Next week we jump to the next section. A 900 metre stretch from the Underpass to the Cawston Bridleway Bridge. We have five Wednesdays in the month of October, so we need to be doing 180 metres per session. However, we have done a lot of work here at the back end of the last cutting-back season, so it’s not quite as intimidating as it sounds.

The main thing is to cut away the overhanging branches.

We don’t want to be cutting trees down, just removing a few branches. We need to be especially thoughtful where the housing gets close to the path and the tree cover acts as a buffer to the road noise.

We finished off with a litter-pick. Mostly aged rubbish that we found under the scrub as we pushed it back.

And lastly, I found this rather splendid fungus.

Apparently, it’s called Dryad’s Saddle and is edible, but Google is saying that it doesn’t taste very nice. I wasn’t feeling particularly peckish anyway…

Dunchurch Bridleway

We have 1,260 metres of the 1,600 metres of bridleway that we need to push out to a decent width. That’s 90 metres per session, with 14 sessions across the cutting-back season.

Ian, Dave, Steve, and Paul turned out armed with saws and hedge-trimmers. Steve and Ian pushed on with creating the path width, whilst Dave and Paul worked on the scrub and scrappy trees that are getting tangled up with the mature ones.

Before we started, it looked like this.

We can slowly get rid of it and let the grass and wildflowers grow on the ground between the bigger trees.

We are trying to get the path to splay around the trees so that it all feels like it is working together, rather than a narrow path through a load of aged scrub.

We broke for coffee at halftime.

And you know when you have that feeling that you have forgotten something, but cannot quite put your finger on what it is….

I realised that I had forgotten to change my shoes.

Health and Safety would have a blooming field day!!

To make up for my foolishness, I made myself do a litter-pick along the whole bridleway.

That’s about it for this week. Thanks for reading if you got this far.

Until next time!

Paul