Smart and not-so smart moves

By the Session Leader:

The warning that the car park was likely to be muddy wasn’t quite right: it was just pools of brown water with patches of bare earth. 

Nevertheless, we managed to park without getting soaked.

At this point, the leader’s camera decided its battery was flat.  Never mind: use phone instead.  Little did he know.

A very pleasant and easy task to start with.  A different volunteer had already cut back the overgrown trees that lined the edge of the field that borders the road between the Wittenhams.  [The South Oxfordshire villages of Long Wittenham and Little Wittenham. – Ed.]  All his cuttings were lying in the field, but needed to be thrown over the wire fence on to the roadside ready to be picked up by another worker, with a trailer, at a later date.

So: a gentle stroll along the sheep-mown grass, stopping every few yards to toss cuttings into piles over the fence.  There were many stops, and it was a long walk that took till coffee time.  It was obviously going to be an easy day ...

After coffee, a very different task.  Along another edge of the field, a hawthorn hedge runs under a row of 11KV electricity poles.  As the hawthorn was growing close to the wires, the Electricity Board had come along and cut them (the hawthorn, not the poles) down to 3’, and almost ruined the hedge.  All the cut wood had been put though a chipper, and the chippings piled around the base of the trees.

To make the hedge effective again, the hawthorn needed to be chain-sawn to the base so that it would regrow into a dense thicket.  So the piles of chippings had to be cleared away to ground level so that the chain saw could get close to the base.

At this point other volunteers with smarter phones started to take photos, just in case:

This task was not so easy: this is where the exercise came in.  A variety of methods were used.  Spades were best where there was room to get them between the trees:

Forks could get between the thinner shoots: 

When all else failed, then down on one’s knees and scrape with gloved hands:

Boots were quite effective too.

The sun had come out, we had warmed up, and we had cleared most of the length of hedge.  This is what it looked like when ready for the chain saw:

It was only when the photographer got home that he discovered that his not so smart phone was not recognized by his PC.  So his twelve photos of the day stay out of sight.  The ones you see are from two members with smarter phones.