Within the Magic Castle

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: