By C:
You know you’re
getting old when you start noticing plaques commemorating work which you
yourself have done.
At the RV
point this morning, you could tell Green Gym had been at the site before. If not individual Green-Gymmers in today’s
work-party, then certainly our predecessors:
Most of
today’s effort was needed around the pond area, which WGG restored as our
first
major project, well over a decade ago. Item
#1 on the list: replace U/S strainer post, so that the cows could be kept out
with something more permanent than baler twine.
Fortunately,
there was at least one volunteer present with a sufficiently long memory to
confirm that it was not WGG who had put in that line of fencing and wire. For as the latter-day counterparts of those
pioneers set to work, there were one or two comments about the
workmanship.
I am quite
sure, however, that our project had incorporated a line of fencing which was
already there. From the outset we knew
better than to drive in staples so deep that they lie flush with the timber,
and are very difficult to remove later, eg for repairs.
The
taskforce included the smallest member of our team, whom we were very glad to
welcome back from a period of sick leave:
He
celebrated his new-found freedom to get and about by returning to his former
duty of ‘standing guard’ – rather a long way from the group:
Actually,
the very first task of the day was to close the gate from Lower to Upper
Meadow, so that the herd on site stayed in place. We did not really want to have cows around while working on an
exclosure which will protect them from falling into the pond.
Meanwhile,
the rest of the team tackled item #2 on the list: to tame the ‘box hedge’ that
isn’t box because it is some other species, the name of which escaped all of us. Here too there was evidence that Green Gym had
been there before:
Unfortunately,
hedge-trimming is singularly not photogenic.
I have never been able to capture it before in pixels. I did not succeed this time. The idea may be that in time, if the formal
hedge-feature is restored, it may help to evoke a very English castle magic. We know that Wallingford Castle is magic
because it can no longer be seen, except for a very few remains, which are from
time to time populated by re-enacters:
 |
| notional Royalist lines viewed from near the pond area |
By
tea-break, the fence-post team had “reached the foundations of the castle” when
digging the deeper hole needed for the replacement post:
Progress was
so rapid after the break for refreshments that the strainer-post-team explored
the possibility of being able to put in a second post. This time, a waymarker post on the other side
of the site. Here too they ran into
difficulties when trying to dig a hole deep enough:
Note in the
background guard-dog off to check out landrover approaching with materials for
setting that post in concrete. But the
extra supplies brought over were not needed, because there was not going to be
enough time in the session to work through the tangle of tree roots, to
excavate a post-hole sufficiently deep.
That task – item #3 on the list – had to be abandoned and left to
another work-party.
Back at the
pond, hedge had been “trimmed” (given the mother-and-father of a ‘hair-cut’)
and elder reduced to stumps. It was time
to transport cuttings to compost-heap – by fork, by pitch-fork, or by hand:
The new Green-Gym
T-shirt has a designer-back as well. It
was perhaps unfortunate that this wearer had not noticed that, when wearing a ‘legionnaire-style’
sunhat in matching colour, the effect from the rear is that the outfit looks
like one which would lead to the person being barred/fined at certain French
beaches?
It was certainly warm enough today to make
one feel one was at a beach in the south of France. By the end of the morning we had this to show
for our efforts:
To round off the party, some volunteers
stayed on to assist with item #4, raising of the new Green Flag, awarded to
the site for 2016/17:
