International Volunteer Day

Posted on December 6, 2023 by Paul - Cawston Greenway

This week we celebrate International Volunteer Day (5th of December).

The day was set up by the United Nations General Assembly in 1985. It’s a day where volunteers are acknowledged and the spirit of volunteerism is promoted at the local, national and international levels.

It’s quite apt as we draw towards the close of our 14th year of volunteering on the path, and I for one can happily say that volunteering has brought me a whole load of personal satisfaction, taught me the joy of giving without expecting something back, given me purpose in my life, and helped me to make a load of friends along the way.

This week we tried to fight back the double-nemesis that is, water where it shouldn’t be, and the dreaded brambles.

Whilst I wait for a lightbulb moment in my head to deal with the blocked culvert, we have no choice but to clear the slightly higher ground and make that a new path, whilst the overflowing water seems to have claimed the old path and turned it into a flowing stream.

The flow of air and sunlight will dry out the new ground and give people a decent place to walk, whilst admiring our new water feature. If push turns to shove and we have no choice but to keep the stream, and the new higher path works out, maybe we can work with the water by making small holding pools and little weirs. It just makes it work better for the wildlife and more interesting to look at. It’s just a back-up plan B if we need it.

We also worked southwards to where we got to last week. It’s just about getting the width now, and maintaining it when everything goes on a mad growth spurt in the spring.

So far, it feels like we are on the right track.

We broke off for coffee and ginger-crunch cookies at our halfway point. As promised, I brought extra coffee for anyone who is not feeling the Christmas spirit, when it seems like everyone else is hopping, skipping and quite literally gambolling towards the holiday season.

Pop along and say hello, we even have an extra all-terrain mug to share the love, along with a great selection of cookies. If you want to join in, you are more than welcome.

Lastly, I have topped up the stock in our Etsy shop. If you know someone who enjoys walking on the greenway, why not give them a personal gift. And it’s a great talking point over Christmas.

Enjoy a brew in one of our mugs, then go and walk or cycle the path, maybe enjoy a biscuit at one of the benches whilst reading about the crazy adventures of us lot, and then commit to a New Year’s Reso to join us next year.

Until next time!

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The Beaver Moon

Posted on November 29, 2023 by Paul - Cawston Greenway

No smutty giggles at the back, please…

The Beaver Moon is called such, because it is when beavers prepare dams ready for the winter. It is also the time that humans would trap beavers for their furs. The Beaver Moon has a spiritual meaning of creating action and transformation in one’s life.

Another little pub quiz snippet that you can thank me for, later.

Today we met at the halfway point at the underpass and pushed in both directions. The southern push was to try and re-tame our hawthorn hedge, and also to see how far we could get with a battery-powered strimmer.

We want to get a couple more strimmers and keep the path wide over the spring and summer. I hate the way the nettles close in and make it uncomfortable for everyone, so we just want to push the path outwards and then have the short-grass, wildflower-rich long-grass, shrubby scrub and then woodland transition.

The underpass clearing is now cleared ready for next year’s wildflower growth.

Still a bit of tidying to do, but thankfully cleared of the dreaded bramble that really is our nemesis.

We covered over 300 metres today, so we are happy with that. We pushed northwards making the path nice and wide so it drys out and people can share it without pushing each other into the scrub.

However, the next bit is going to be tough. We have four workdays to try and clear as much of this section as possible, and navigate the path around the flooded bit. After that it will be the New Year and we will be back at the south end making scallops and stuff for wildlife micro-habitats.

Our YouTube of the progress today.

We had a really interesting conversation around our Douglas Fir, named Dougie, last week.

Steve suggested that it would be a good thing to collect tree seeds and plant them for others to enjoy, when the tree is 300 or so years old. What a wonderful legacy to leave. I think we could develop this idea and work with it.

Thanks, Steve.

For the next few weeks, I’m not sure what is worse. Dealing with the flooding or dealing with the ever encroaching brambles. The next four workdays are going to test us…

As always, spare coffee is available if anyone wants to pop along for a chat or join in. Don’t let the Christmas season drag you down if you are not feeling it.

Lastly, and you knew it was coming… We have yet another new country tuning in…

Bahrain. Feeling truly humbled with gosh knows how many people from 123 different countries around the world taking time to look at this blog.

Thank you.

Until next time!

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A Chariots of Fire Moment

Posted on November 22, 2023 by Paul - Cawston Greenway

We’ve been sort of cruising along at about 120 metres per workday for weeks on end. Today it felt like the shackles fell away and we raced ahead covering 400 metres, and the next 400 metres looks after itself, so we leap-frog to the underpass next week.

What a lovely feeling!!

We started at the recycled bench and the first stint was working southwards to pick up where we finished last week.

The second stint was all about powering northwards to Charlie’s wildflower clearing.

As you can see, we made little habitat piles with the cuttings.

We had coffee and cookies and I brought extra brew. I have put it out there that if anyone is feeling a bit down or lonely as we hurtle towards Christmas and New Year, pop along and share a coffee. We normally break around 11am and have a cuppa and a bit of light-hearted banter. I think this week the conversation ranged from rabbits to squirrels to cats. You really needed to be there… But seriously, I know how rubbish it can make people feel when everyone seems to be getting into the Christmas holiday vibe and some of us are not, so do come along if you need to. And if you bring biscuits we will love you forever.

We have left the butterfly clearing that got covered in nettles almost as soon as we made it.

I’m just very conscious that we have created a micro-habitat with the nettles and if we go smashing through it, the whole thing will be destroyed before we allow a full year of insect life-cycle. Hopefully, we will get a load of butterflies next year.

Here is our YouTube of the day’s work. We all love it.

And lastly, another country has tuned in. This confused me at first. Republic Of The Congo. Not the Democratic Republic Of The Congo, which is a bigger country to the east. How on earth two different countries can be called the same name is totally baffling to a blithering idiot like me. Google it because I really cannot begin to explain…

That’s an amazing 122 countries looking at this blog. Very humbling, indeed.

Until next time!

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Remembrance Day

Posted on November 15, 2023 by Paul - Cawston Greenway

This week the significant events keep rolling in. Remembrance Day is, of course, a memorial day observed since the end of the First World War to honour armed forces members who have died in the line of duty.

My grandmother’s brother died in France from war wounds. Samuel Bacon, born 18/10/1897, died 25/8/1918, aged 20.

Nice to pause and remember the past for a little bit.

This week we had to battle with Storm Debi, which brought yet more rain and severe winds. We finished what we started last week, to give us a decent start today.

We also litter-picked from where we were today, to the southern end. It’s looking really good, even if we say so ourselves.

This last chunk took us all of October and November last year. Look at the blog for those months if you think I’m exaggerating. We really got bogged down with it. This year it has been a lot quicker and easier.

We need to invest in decent battery-powered grass strimmers to keep on top of it over the spring and summer. Watch this space!

We ploughed forwards, or rather, northwards and just missed the point where the path naturally widens, by about 15 metres. I will catch us up again ready for next Wednesday. I’m not really sure how much ground we covered but I reckon it was about 150+ metres.

We enjoyed coffee and cookies with our all-terrain mugs at the halfway point of the workday, where we entertained ourselves with light-hearted banter.

Lastly, we have a couple of fungi finds.

One is called Fragrant Funnel and the other looks like something that you would find in the fruit and veg department of a supermarket!

Until next week!

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Remember, Remember, The 5th of November…

Posted on November 8, 2023 by Paul - Cawston Greenway

These historic events are coming thick and fast at the moment. Last week we had Halloween, this week we had Bonfire Night which gives me the chance to show off the lovely village where I live.

Dunchurch (in England for my International followers) is famous for The Gunpowder Plot in 1605.

Guy Fawkes tried to blow-up Parliament with two-and-a-half tons of gunpowder and his co-conspirators waited for news of the plot at an inn right here in the village.

Here are a few snaps of the inn, which is now a private residence, and a few more of the village.

Possibly a little self-indulgent, but it is what it is. The Dunchurch railway station is the first stop along the old railway-line that runs from Rugby to Leamington Spa and part of it is now the nature trail that this blog is all about.

Dunchurch

We are still on the path-widening mission and once it is done, we are going to try to keep it this wide through the spring and summer, and push the wildflower-rich grassy edge outwards before the bramble scrub starts. We’re just wasting so much time going over the same ground each year.

This is what I did before today to keep us on track.

The weather took a squally turn for the worst today and quite a few times I felt a trickle of rain snaking down my spine. But we cracked on and made a start on the next 150 metre chunk of path.

What we are trying to do is release the raised ballast path that runs alongside the muddy strip. It just gives people the option of walking on dry ground, rather than in the muddy puddles.

There’s still a bit of work to do on this bit, but rather than get totally bogged down here for weeks on end, I will get it finished before next Wednesday.

After my various excursions around Woodland Trust managed woods over the last week, and watching reel upon reel of YouTube vids, the general consensus of a healthy woodland is lots of biodiversity and a lot of different areas for wildlife to move in and out of. Basically, lots of lichen, moss, fungi, grassland, wildflowers, decaying wood, scrub, and healthy well spaced-out trees. The wildlife will thrive if these things are present.

I did a quick audit of what was right in front of my nose and this is what I found…

We are pretty happy with this little snap-shot.

In other news, Martyn the Land Manager is going to look at the flooding problem at Berrybanks and work out what the best way to deal with it is. Watch this space.

And lastly, a new country has tuned in. Someone from Mauritius, which is a little island off the east coast of Africa.

Thank you Mauritian person for taking the time to look, from what looks like an absolutely divine place to live.

This puts us on 121 countries out of 195 in the whole World. Pretty humbling.

Think of my arms, back and legs as I get this bit of the path looking as good as the rest.

Until next week!

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A Spooky Week

Posted on November 1, 2023 by Paul - Cawston Greenway

We had Halloween to contend with this week. The eve of the Western Christian feast of All Hallows. It begins the observance of Allhallowtide, the time in the liturgical year dedicated to remembering the dead, including saints (hallows), martyrs, and all the faithful departed. In popular culture, the day has become a celebration of horror, being associated with the macabre and supernatural.

Thank me later when it comes up in the spooky pub quiz.

We carried on with the path widening and at first, I thought muggins here had miscalculated the distance between the benches. We did about 150 metres but it was hard going. We haven’t trimmed back this part for a while so the scrub was pretty dense, rather than just growth from this summer. I can let myself off a bit of self-flagellation, which I normally end up doing when I am way too optimistic about how much we can do each week.

Before and after photos and despite removing a load of scrub, it looks like we didn’t do much at all!! We still have the right-hand side to do, which puts us behind plan, but I will probably catch us up over the next day or so, to keep us on track.

Work in progress and a bit of tree release.

When we finish the path widening we’re going to come back and work behind the trees to create more of a woodland feel to the trail. We are not getting rid of all the scrub, before everyone starts hyper-ventilating with horror-stricken palpitations, we are just knocking it back to get a permanently wide path, a good wildflower-rich grassy verge, and then a scrubby understory.

Behind the scrub are a lot of eerie and dead trees. It does look very spooky, creepy and dark. Dead wood is great but for the whole area to be baron is not so good, so we need to do some thinning to let some sunlight in.

Here is our YouTube from where we left off last week, bench-to-bench.

We were working southwards today, but the overall progress is northwards, as is the video.

I visited three woodlands managed by the Woodland Trust this week, just to make sure that we are on the right track, and to kinda confirm in my own head that what I think we are working towards is actually attainable.

Here they are:

I got there before all of the leaf-peepers. That’s a term for all the people who flock to the woods to see the leaves turning golden brown, bright red and deep amber, as autumn shuffles towards winter.

Pretty impressive and worth us slowly transitioning towards. We don’t want to do it too quickly or the existing wildlife will not be able to gradually adapt. The things that stand out for me are the path widths, tree spacing, and woodland floor. It just feels so much more open.

Lastly, we enjoyed a festive mince pie and a warming coffee, in our all-terrain mugs.

Hopefully I can pull us back on track ready for next week and we can stay roughly where we need to be.

With all the recent rain, and I am expecting some sort of backlash from Storm Ciaran tomorrow, we still have the troublesome drainage problem at Berrybanks. I’m waiting for Martyn, the Sustrans Land Manager, to get back to us with ideas, but if anyone can think of a way to get the water into the drain, or some other way of dealing with it, please let me know. At the moment it’s spilling out of the input drain and flowing down the centre of the path for about 800 metres.

Just pop any ideas in the comments below.

Until next week!

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The Hunter’s Moon

Posted on October 25, 2023 by Paul - Cawston Greenway

This week we blast towards the Hunter’s Moon, so called because October is the month where humans and animals alike, stock up for winter. Squirrels hide their nuts, deer fatten up for the long cold months ahead and humans hunt for their woolly jumpers from their bottom drawer. In ancient times it would be the humans hunting the deer and storing that meat by covering it in salt and wrapping it up, or placing it in barrels full of water to create a brine. Vegetables were pickled in brine or vinegar to preserve them for a season or two. It must have been a very salty diet, indeed.

We continued with our path widening and young tree removal. We need light to get to the floor to create ground-cover for birds and small mammals to forage and hunt. I have gone over my old notes that I made with David, the Ecologist from Sustrans (the land owners) and he suggests coppicing 10% of the mature trees every year, on a rotational basis. This is not killing the trees, they will grow back over time. What it does though, is it keeps the tree canopy at different heights and stages, and helps the remaining trees to reach their full potential and allows the woodland floor to develop properly for greater biodiversity.

We’ve got about 500 metres left before the path naturally widens and sort of takes care of itself. We then have the bit between the underpass, through to Berrybanks and on to the Bear pub bridge, which is about 550 metres. With a fair wind behind us, we should have all the path widening done before Christmas. We can then spend January and February creating scallops so we have micro-habitats along the trail.

Here are a couple of YouTube vids showing our progress over the last three weeks.

We are kinda on plan, even though I tend to be wildly over-optimistic about how much we can get done each week, and somehow we need to re-stain the benches before winter, so that is quietly gnawing away at the back of my mind…

My feeling is that we need to bust-a-gut trying to keep the path at this width over the spring and summer of next year. At the moment it really feels like groundhog day and we never seem to have time to do the coppicing and other stuff, because half of the cutting back season is spend going over the same ground every year.

Anyhow, we broke off for a pick-me-up coffee in our all-terrain mugs and this week, I thought I would mix up the biscuit offering with some ginger crunch cookies. They went down a little too well.

We also strimmed around the benches with the less powerful electric strimmer and did a litter-pick up to the Cawston Bridleway bridge.

We need to be able to move on with nothing outstanding on the path behind us. Just keep ploughing forwards.

In other news, we had a person from a new country in Africa viewing the blog. Mauritania, which is totally new to me, is on the western side of Africa and is kinda south of the Sahara Desert.

Hello, person from Mauritania and thank-you for taking the time to read the blog.

Well that’s about it for this week. Next week we are at the birdfeeder clearing working south to pick up where we got to today, and then pushing northwards clearing off the higher ballast ridge, before the rain starts and the middle of the path turns into a mud-bath.

Until then!

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Are You The Army…?

Posted on October 18, 2023 by Paul - Cawston Greenway

Seriously, this was a question a member of the public asked us a while back. We do normally wear green T-shirts and camouflage patterned trousers, but mine are from Sainsbury’s (that’s a huge supermarket chain for my international followers) and definitely not army issue. And we were certainly not on training manoeuvres…

If it’s not the army, it’s Community Service – this is what you get when the courts find you guilty of a crime, but deem it not worthy of a custodial sentence. Instead you are required to do a number of hours of unpaid work in the community. Probably what everyone will now be doing, since the news that all the jails in the UK are full!!

And if people don’t assume the first two things above, they probably think that we are a group of happy-clappy tree-huggers. Whilst we must love nature and being out in it, I don’t really see ourselves like this. We started out focussed on just making the disused railway trail into a usable path. The nature bit sort of grew on us over time, and with our dearly departed friend, Mick, slowly guiding the ship in that general direction, whilst our main thrust was “a path for everyone”.

Before we start on today’s adventure, I just want to share a photo of a similar path up near Walsall. It has a lot of support and guidance from Sustrans (the land owners).

It could very easily be our path, but it isn’t. What it shows is how wide the path ideally needs to be. You can follow their progress at:-

http://www.facebook.com/SupportBackTheTrack.

So without further ado, we set about widening our path to the tree-line. We need it to be wide so walkers and cyclists can use the thing in harmony, and people have a good sight ahead of them so they don’t feel like the Cawston bogeyman is about to jump out.

This is photos of up and down before we started, mid-point, and at the end. We all agreed that it looks way better.

I did a YouTube of it and what needs doing next week to carry it on.

Once we have the path cleared we can then work on the overhang and also scallop the scrub behind the trees to encourage wildflowers to grow. We can keep any new nettle and bramble growth at bay using the lightweight battery strimmer across the summer next year.

We took advice from the Woodland Trust who said that we need to be ‘halo thinning’ around good quality trees so that we don’t have loads of saplings all competing for the same water, nutrients and light. We also need a varied tree canopy so loads of light gets through to the ground.

After our rather intense morning of work whilst Storm Babet lashed unmercifully around us, we eventually broke-off for coffee and cookies.

We seem to be having storm after storm. Last week a huge branch came down and narrowly missed squishing our Christmas tree by a whisker… One might suggest that an angel was sitting on the top of that tree and willed the falling branch slightly to the left…

We have two new countries tuning in this week. Luxemburg and Albania. I do a lot of work searching for blogs in a specific area, reading the posts and leaving a nice comment if I found the blog interesting. It’s always nice when fellow bloggers reciprocate.

Our flag count is now at 119 out of 195 countries (61%) so very happy with that. Some countries are proving extremely difficult to crack. Mongolia, that bit around Iran, and Central Africa being a bit of a blot on the map, but I keep plugging away.

Amazingly, there are only eight countries left in Europe to capture. Belarus, Latvia, Estonia, Montenegro, Andorra, Monaco, San Marino and Holy See.

Holy See is the smallest country in Europe and the World, being the Vatican City and is 0.17 square miles in size. Holy See comes from the Latin “seat”. Thank me later when you win the pub quiz.

Lastly, I litter-picked the whole path over the last weekend.

It’s looking good…

Until next week!

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World Mental Health Day

Posted on October 9, 2023 by Paul - Cawston Greenway

We had World Mental Health Day this week. It was actually yesterday (Tuesday 10th October). Ignore the posting date. That was when I started to thrash out this post as a draft. The blog always comes out on a Wednesday evening.

This is so important for us and one of the reasons that we do what we do.

With blokes there is a huge amount of loneliness and a complete inability to talk about it. This then creates a downward spiral where everything compounds to make matters ten times worse and sadly, depression sets in and that leads to bad things happening.

We are always here on a Wednesday morning, with coffee and biscuits at about 11 o’clock. Wander down and say hello if you need to. There is always a spare mug of coffee going, and we are full of light-hearted banter.

Enough said.

You may recall about a month ago I was wittering on about us being nominated for an award. I didn’t really give it much thought after that. I thought that there are so many other local volunteer groups doing such wonderful things, that nobody will be interested in what we are doing.

However…

We won a thing!! We are so happy about this. So very happy.

Last week we left the area at Berrybanks with a huge pond that is, no doubt, great for wildlife, but totally in the wrong place. Young children play in this area and having open water is just too risky.

We had cleared the drainage channels and agitated the blocked culvert. The water seems to have drained away. We will keep an eye on it, but if it drains like this I need not worry.

Today we were at our most southerly end and started clearing out all the spent wildflowers and encroaching bramble, that just keeps going and going and going… It doesn’t even seem to slow down in the winter.

The Potford Dam wildflower clearing is cleared out. To leave it means all the goodness from the dying wildflowers go into the ground and encourages all the thuggish stuff to grow like nettles, bramble and thistles. The area will eventually turn to scrub and biodiversity it greatly reduced.

Our YouTube of the clearing.

It looks a bit brutal but this is the way it has to be.

The paths between the wildflower clearings need to be wide enough to cater for all the human traffic. Namely, bikes and walkers.

We want to push the path back to the tree-line and let the wildlife live and move around beyond that. If we can pull it off it means the trail is working in so many different ways for so many different things.

We are just going to keep going, working northwards in this way, for the next five months. I just don’t see the point of putting ourselves under loads of time pressure. What gets done will get done. What gets left will get done next year.

That’s about it for this week. One last thing (you knew it was coming!!)…

I got a little bit overexcited when I saw Qatar and Kuwait appear on the daily map stats. When I checked back I noticed that someone from Qatar had viewed back in 2017, so I consoled myself to one new country view this week. However, as I quietly sulked over the weekend, someone from Kosovo had a look and a really good look because they registered five page views. Thank you Kuwait person and Kosovo person. You have taken our country view total to an amazing 117 out of 195 countries in the world, which is 60%. In your mind’s eye, imagine me licking my lips excitedly.

Until next week!

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A Good Toilet Time Read

Posted on October 4, 2023 by Paul - Cawston Greenway

Someone this week suggested that the blog is a great read whilst sitting on the toilet!!

Being British and us lot being a bit (very) prudish when it comes to discussing our bathroom habits, I wasn’t sure how to take this unsolicited feedback. Was it a compliment? Was it a criticism? Was it someone trying to tell me, in a very roundabout way, that the blog is a pile of poo?

As my geeky little brain turned this over and over in my head, I eventually called on the services of google to try and get to the bottom of the matter.

Bathroom reading is the act of reading text while in a bathroom, usually while sitting on the toilet and defecating. The practice has been common throughout history and remains widespread today with both printed material and smartphones.

History

Bathroom reading has been commonplace throughout history. Before the invention of modern toilet paper, Americans in the colonial period often used newspaper or similar printed material to wipe themselves, because newsprint paper is fairly soft and absorbent. Writing in the 18th century, the English statesman Philip Stanhope, 4th Earl of Chesterfield reported that he knew “a gentleman who was so good a manager of his time that he would not even lose that small portion of it which the call of nature obliged him to pass in the necessary-house; but gradually went through all the Latin poets, in those moments.

The advent of the mobile phone is believed to have significantly increased bathroom reading. A 2009 study conducted in Israel found that a majority of adults read from their cell phones on the toilet, and a 2015 study conducted by Verizon found that 90% of cell phone users admitted to reading from their phones while on the toilet.

So there you are – a potted history of toilet time reading. I’m still none the wiser and there is also a whole load of psychobabble about filling one’s mind through the eyes as one empties oneself at the other end… You can google it if you really want to go there!!

But enough of this lavatorial talk, we had work to do in the form of getting to find out why our culvert is constantly overflowing.

We popped off the covers and straight away we could see a massive head of water with nowhere to go.

The iron drain no longer works, and neither does my back after pulling the heavy cover off, because the ground level has worn down below it so much, and the whole culvert is blocked solid with silt. Whenever it rains the water washes over the top and creates a huge pond which then slithers down the path until it eventually soaks away.

We tried in vain to dislodge the blockage, but it was having none of it. We eventually re-battened down the hatches and had a cup of coffee and a coconut macaroon at our new picnic bench.

Whilst we absolutely hate to concede defeat, This is way beyond us and our tools, which are effectively for home gardening. We will bat it up to the Sustrans HQ (the landowners) and see what comes back.

We did try and clear the path of the water so that the pond could drain a little, but it needs something a bit more permanent.

It seems to have emptied a bit.

In other news, we have had five new countries tuning in.

Puerto Rico, Morocco, Togo, Zambia and Oman. Terrific news and hello new people. Thank you for taking our countries-that-have-looked-at-the-blog to 115.

  • Puerto Rico
  • Morocco
  • Togo
  • Zambia
  • Oman

Well that’s about it for this week. And whilst I am left with the mental vision of hundreds of people sitting on the loo, reading my blog, I can at least relax with the knowledge that a couple of beers will soften that image and also take away the screaming pain in my lower back.

Until next time!

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