Who’s up for a challenge?

By ‘C’:

“A winter sun.”

– “But a mild day, all the same.”

So we reflected, as we gathered for the start of a winter’s task: to coppice encroaching willow from an area which is meant to be a ‘wet meadow’.  

To get to the said meadow meant walking past a point where there had once been: railings (removed because they got damaged); and, over the duckboards, chicken-wire (removed by us, and replaced with staples, which were hammered in one by one):

From there, we had to plunge into the ‘undergrowth’ – where the site-warden cheerfully assured us that “There is a way in there somewhere, which takes you through to the meadow!”  One volunteer went on ahead, to explore the route:

Then the rest of us followed, one by one, with the hand-tools:

“The rakes’ progress”

This was the mid-way point, where we realised why we had been advised to wear wellies rather than walking/working boots:

Thankfully, the meadow itself was quite dry, as it usually is at this time of year – just a little tricky to walk across on account of natural trip hazards (the odd bramble or stump).

We knew that the combination of this weather and this task was gonna make us sweat.  But volunteers showed the usual Green-Gym relish for a tough task.  (Though it does not compare to the sporting challenge recently completed by the site-warden – respect!)

Smaller scrub could be tackled with loppers:

Every Green-Gymmer has their own style.  This particular volunteer opted for working from the outer edge of the area, inwards.  Why?  “So that I can see where I’ve been”:

Bigger targets took a bowsaw:

Cutting down the largest stand of all was not an exclusively male venture.  But that you cannot see from the photograph, because the woman with the arborist’s saw was behind the camera lens:

What is true was that it was some of the men on the team who took particular delight in reducing this …

 

to this:

All these operations naturally produced considerable quantities of brash.  For the moment, those were piled in the meadow – alongside heaps of softer materials which had been cut earlier by the warden with the brush-cutter, and which she had now raked:

By tea-break, there were piles of cut stuff all over the shop:

Inevitably this meant that in the second half of the morning, we were engaged in moving these outsize risings to brash piles – not a favourite task with some volunteers: “Cutting is fun!  Dragging is boring.”

In the meantime, there were respective merits of different pieces of kit to discuss.  From the mechanism of loppers (levers or cog-wheels) …

to the capabilities of this beast, which the warden would be wielding later, as a substitute for the brush-cutter:

A ‘BCS’ (so called after the manufacturer)

with Allen Scythe attachment

Once the dragging began, we made surprisingly short work of it.  Despite the occasional queue to get to the brash pile:

“It’s literally a log jam”

Soon it was a question of volunteers going over the ground to pick up “the last pieces”.  This happened several times, so no guarantee that this photograph records the very last bit being removed from site:

For the finishing touch, someone artistically arranged the morning’s ‘find’.  What was a clump of willow (unwanted because in the wrong place), is now “an art installation”: