Mud Dogs and Englishmen

By the Session Leader:

Miserable day.  Raining.  Forecast not good.  We are supposed to work here:

The temptation is to spend the morning here instead:

But no: Green Gymmers work whatever the weather: mid-day sun or mid-day rain.  Besides, the rain has stopped, and the pub isn’t open yet ... 

So what was the task?  Water-channel clearing, again!  “I thought we did that last time 

we were here!” called out one volunteer.  – “Yes,” came the relentless reply from the site warden: “but that was last month.  The cress has had four weeks to grow since then …” 

He was teasing, of course.  Cress does grow year-round.  (Indeed it was planted to be a winter crop for local people: when frost threatened, they would submerge the plants beneath the stream, where the water remains at a constant 11 Celsius throughout the year.)  We, however, were set to work at a slightly different spot from last time, upstream.  

A squad of apprentices from RAF Halton had made an excellent start on this sector the previous week, but channels needed to be made still wider, growth on/by the banks cut back, and further progress made upstream, even to the education centre if that was possible …  So everyone to work!

As it was not feasible to deploy wheelbarrows in this zone, the team split into three.  The ‘cutters’ cut back the cress, and piled it onto the bunds to drain off some of the water:

The ‘porters’ then carried it by the forkful, or dragged it with the muck rake, over to the bank.  Some care had to be taken not to sink or trip in the mud, which had accumulated in the middle areas:

Floating cut vegetation along the stream with a muck rake was easier for the porter, but naturally meant that the cress was waterlogged again by the time it came to be loaded on to the bank.

The ‘stackers then piled it into neat rows at the back of the bank (but away from the fence, so that the neighbouring landowner’s fence-posts do not rot prematurely), leaving a path at the front:

By tea-break we had worked our way up to the dam across the stream:

Today’s cake from our star baker was so good that the sole photographer today [aka the Session Leader – Ed.] was too busy eating to remember to take a photo of the goodies!

In the second half of the session, progress on the bank was slowed down by some heavily overgrown ‘undergrowth’:

Even so, by session end there were some impressive mounds of cress (and mud) piled up along the bank:

The photograph does not convey the smell, which was particularly pungent at this end.  “Like rotting seaweed” according to one Green-Gymmer; described more positively by another as “reminiscent of summer childhood holidays.”  To get an idea of the scale of 

the operation, mentally multiply the pictured vegetation by a factor of 3 or 4.

We did not reach the education centre, but the site warden ‘promised’ us that we could continue up to there next time.