This is supposed to be the fifth heatwave of the year… Or so the newspapers would have us believe.

Call me sceptical, but I am struggling to call this even hot???

Before we get into the day, I can share what ChatGPT thinks is going on in my head.

The text…

Don’t ask me how? It’s quite scary that my thoughts can be tapped into quite so easily…

George Orwell’s 1984 really is happening!!

Anyway, back to the here and now… We started cutting back in earnest today. Ram made the executive decision that we needed to go sideways and get the width, rather than focusing on trying to cover as much distance as possible.

We want a decent wildflower-rich grassy margin between the path and the scrub. Before long, we could see the method in Ram’s madness.

It started to look pretty good.

We broke for coffee and seemed to be back on the Oreo biscuits.

Reduced numbers today with Steve, Ram, Andrew, Martin, Reece, Dave, and Paul, but we managed OK.

And then the worst bit: tidying up. Made 100 times harder because muggins here couldn’t remember where we hid the rakes.

But we improvised and got all the cutting into a decent habitat-pile that will slowly rot down, producing warmth and shelter for a whole host of wildlife in the autumn and winter.

We finally got our first Mile Marker Post in. This is something that Martin and Dave have been working on and is really just a bit of a nod to the heritage of the trail, which was once a working railway. It also creates another avenue of interest for people to explore.

When they are all in place, I fully expect to see Strava Segments appearing and all sorts of personal bests being recorded.

This is a short explanation from Martin as to what the posts are all about.

In 1845, Parliament passed a law making it compulsory for railway companies to provide visible mileposts alongside the track. These came in a wide variety of designs and are still used on railways today. At least two of the originals are still present on the Cawston Greenway, lying in the undergrowth. We thought it would be good to put a full set back in, every quarter-mile, in the locations where the originals were. So in total we are installing seven, covering from 1½ to 3 miles. (Zero is at the junction with the Rugby – Birmingham line near the cement works).

Thanks, Martin and Dave, for making this happen.

We have a new tool, well, two actually. We splashed out on another hedge trimmer, so we have five now, and this beast.

It cost £133, so it wasn’t cheap, but boy-oh-boy, it cuts the higher branches like a hot knife through butter. The overhanging branches will stop the sunlight from hitting the newly cleared ground and make all of our efforts a total waste of time, so thank you to everyone who has helped us to purchase this new tool with lovely donations.

Buy Me A Coffee/Patron:

Whilst we are on the subject of donations, we had a very generous Buy Me a Coffee donation of £25 from Mike last week. Thank you very much.

Still loads going on in the background, but as you can see, things are starting to happen.

Here are a couple of quick “after” photos of what we did today.

Still a bit of a chunk of scrub that needs to go, but hopefully we can kinda see the trail shaping up.

Lastly, I did a quick litter-pick after the workday.

Nothing will wreck what we are doing more than litter… For me, it is just not conducive to a stress-free environment.

That’s about it for this week.

Until next time!

Paul