On Sail Now

“Catch your chicken before you grease your pan,” as they say in Wisconsin.

Total absence of site warden this morning set up a situation with manifold potential to become really quite interesting.  This prompted ‘C’ to add a couple of extra items to the personal kit for today:

Site-warden absence was pre-planned.  He had other things to do, trusted us to get on with the job on our own, and left us with very clear instructions:

Task is bramble clearance on the top of Beacon Hill.  There are some large patches of bramble invading the chalk downland that need cutting, clearing, and burning on the fire site.  If you park in our carpark (nearest postcode HP14 3YL) and walk down to the concrete pad, then take the path along the top of the Down to the end of Beacon Hill, here you find a hand gate just beyond a metal seat.  Go through the hand gate and turn right.  Hopefully you will find the fire site used by Sonning Common Green Gym before.  Once you are there it will be fairly obvious!  If the cut material won’t burn, maybe you could just pile it up next to the fire site please.  No sheep in here until September.

So we had to get to a meeting point we had not used in many a long year (and which was totally new to some of us), locate the right bit of bramble, and annihilate it.  What could possibly go wrong?

The first obvious thing which could have gone wrong, didn’t.  On the dot of 10:00, at the designated RV point, all Green-Gymmers for today’s session were present and correct.

The first problem, however, had already become apparent. 

If the cut material won’t burn, maybe you could just pile it up next to the fire site please.

We knew we were not going to be able to burn the cuttings because no-one had brought any fire-lighting kit.  This was due a classic failure of communication.  ‘C’ had told ‘Q’ that we would be minus a warden, therefore would need to bring all our own equipment, and that the task included a bonfire.  Unfortunately, ‘Q’, being accustomed to thinking of himself as “just Tools Officer”, was so busy packing tools that he did not think to bring so much as a box of matches.  Ah well, we would not have been able to keep a fire going for long anyway, because we would have had to damp it down before leaving the site.

Next difficulty:

walk down to the concrete pad …

What concrete pad?  There was no concrete pad to be seen from the car-park.  We prepared to make our way to the estimated grid-reference point under our own navigation.

Confirming which direction we should take for Beacon Hill was easy: compasses do come in handy; as do paper copies of OS maps (to supplement on-line maps studied the night before).  Choosing which path to take from the car-park was a team effort: one Green-Gymmer observed that the noticeboard referred to one route as being via a sunken road.  That did not sound right, given our instructions to stay high on the down, so we took the right-hand footpath.

That we had made the right choice, was shown by the fact that we soon came to an area which could definitely be described as “concrete pad”:

For the timebeing, we paused only briefly to admire the slightly hazy view.  It was only on the return journey that there was speculation about the reason for the concrete pad.  Male Green-Gymmers (some of them – not all) insisted it “must date back to the war” and “must be a platform for anti-aircraft guns”.  Female Green-Gymmers asked why it couldn’t just be a viewing platform, dating from when the motorway was built.  After all, when motorways were first built in this country, they caused great excitement; and the engineering required for the cut through the Chilterns was a remarkable piece of work.  Alternatively, the viewpoint might have been put in at the time of the road-building as a public amenity, to offset the impact of the construction.

then take the path along the top of the Down

The path did more of less follow the contours, but we were hardly striding along the top of the ridge.  From the side we were on, we had a remarkable view of the motorway, the floor of the Thames Valley, and beyond:

… to the end of Beacon Hill.  Here you find a hand gate just beyond a metal seat.  

We would not have described the spot we reached as the “end of Beacon Hill”, for the highest point still lay some way off, to the right.  However, there was something which could be described as “a metal seat” (for all that one Green-Gymmer said it was “part of the original beacon”), and beyond something which was definitely a gate.  Which we went through:

Now the fun really started. 

Go through the hand gate and turn right.  

Persuading the group to turn right was not so easily accomplished when the main line of the path lay straight ahead – and there was a doubt in many of our minds that we had reached the “end” of Beacon Hill.

Hopefully you will find the fire site used by Sonning Common Green Gym before.  Once you are there it will be fairly obvious!

The word ‘hopefully’ in this context sounded quite ominous.  Tea-crate and equipment were left beside an isolated tree, high on a hill, which could act as our new rallying point, as the team scattered across the downland looking for the fire site.

This took some time, for the fire site was well concealed by the lie of the land:

Eventually, however, two enterprising Green-Gymmers spotted an area, where there appeared to have been some vegetation clearance undertaken recently, and reasoned that they should explore a little further in that direction.  They were right.  (Well done, Peta and Tony!)

It was time to close with ‘the enemy’.  Supplies were quickly brought forward to a fresh WGG HQ, and equipment drawn from the tool-bags and put into action:

“Right, let’s get a bit vicious!”

“This may not be the most efficient way to get rid of brambles …

… but it’s jolly satisfying”

Shears were the tool of choice on the main sector of the front line:

This allowed for some Green-Gymmers to work in closer proximity to each other.  But often it was a matter of shears, followed up by sheer brute force:

“It would be nice to break through.”

Who needs a cable-machine at a conventional gym?

One Green-Gymmer did in fact ‘break through’.  He had set it as his personal target for the morning:

He did not, however, pause long to enjoy the sense of personal achievement: 

Well, as my old metalwork teacher used to say, “A job isn’t finished until you’ve tidied up.”

So he tidied up, and in doing so revealed the newly-created gap in what had been continuous bramble cover:

All in all (yes, including the business of finding the place) it was a good morning – we think/hope.  We are reasonably confident that it was the right brambles we were cutting back.  It was a lovely spot to be in, and the weather was kind to us.  The breeze, which had been the softest of WNW first thing, developed – where we were, deflected by trees – into a gentle NNE: enough to ensure we did not overheat.  About 4 knots, we reckoned.  “It may not be enough to fly a kite, but we could sail in this,” commented one Green-Gymmer.

This was the point at which ‘C’ learned something new: namely that the story of sailors being able to coax more speed out of sails by wetting them is just a story – a landsman’s myth.  Wetting one’s face does make it easier to judge a breeze; and it is easier to sail in a mere breath of wind if the sails are stiff – new sails would be ideal.

This prompted the observation that it keeps the sail-makers in business.  Which in turn generated a remark about St Paul having been a sail-maker.  (It’s usually translated ‘tent-maker’, but the same kind of cloth was woven for awnings and boat-sails – and there would be more sales to be made from making sails.)  And this led to musings on what shape of sail would have been used in St Paul’s day: triangular, as on the Arab feluccas which can be seen to this day; or square, which would be easier to make? 

The postscript to that conversation (thank you, Tony, again) is that: “In the ancient world, the square sail was employed universally in the Mediterranean... The earliest evidence of the existence of lateens in the Mediterranean is in Byzantine manuscripts of the late ninth century.”  (Arab seafaring in the Indian Ocean in Ancient and Early Medieval Times – George F Hourani)  The material used would have been woven leaves (coconut or palm) or cotton sailcloth (for which Tarsus, where Paul aka Sha’ul came from, was famous).

Anyway, by session end, Green-Gymmers were well-exercised physically and mentally.  And there were two large piles of cuttings for the next work-party on site to burn up.  One is beside ‘the old front line’:

Before

After

The other is beside the fire site:

After all, no sheep in here until September.