By ‘C’ (with additional photography from the
session leader):
Back on Beacon Hill for the last scrub-bash of
the season!
Well the
last scrub-clearing for us at this site anyway.
Actually the first task was an impromptu Green-Gym quiz in the
site yard. What were these things, being
temporarily stored in the sheep-pens?
Giant hairbrushes;
mug-trees; hat-stands; feed-stations for livestock (“You hang hay on the spikes”);
equipment for preparing fleeces (“scaling wool – after carding”) … With mock solemnity, the suggestions came
thick and fast. But no-one guessed
correctly, or even got close.
The answer was:
spare parts for a wood sculpture. They
represent barley.
Then we
played ‘follow my leader’. To be more precise,
the game of follow the landie until it stopped beside the work-area:
And at last,
we got down to work. For whatever
reason, I seemed to arrive at the target zone some considerable time before the
others. I had not been running,
honest! I cannot think that it was a
general lack of enthusiasm for a high-energy destructive task on a day blessed
with perfect Green-Gym weather. Maybe I just have more of a “killer instinct”. [Green-Gymmers are, of course, all proud of doing things well which are a. legal, b. socially useful & responsible. – Ed.]
At any rate,
in order to get down to work, I headed straight up the slope: to take out first
the scrub which was growing higher up, and therefore further away from the
bonfire area. The ground was remarkably
bare for mid-April. The only species of
chalk-grassland flower that had really got going was the dog violet. Even those specimens became fewer, the higher
one climbed. It was also decidedly
breezier up top: once severed, whole sections of small-tree were behaving like
tumbleweed! One big advantage of my
station, however, was that noise from the motorway was less obtrusive. Indeed I myself barely noticed it.
Dog violet
is, I think, a different species from that which features in The House at Pooh Corner. For I am fairly sure that the Shepard illustration
shows Piglet smelling one, whereas the sweet little flowers on the hillside
this morning were unscented. Even so, I
kept thinking of various lines from the story, ‘Rabbit has a Busy Day’. [Don’t
worry: none of the volunteers picked any of the wild flowers. – Ed.]
… it suddenly came over [Piglet] that nobody had ever picked Eeyore a bunch of violets … and he thought how sad it was to be an Animal who had never had a bunch of violets picked for him. So he hurried out again, saying to himself, “Eeyore, Violets” and then “Violets, Eeyore,” in case he forgot, because it was that sort of day …
My visual
reward for reaching the edge of the slope (before it reaches the line of a
path, and the ground dips down again) – another view of motorway:
Had the
session been slow to get going? Possibly. [“Like a rusty squeeze-box?” – Ed.] But
from just a single Green-Gymmer deployed, one by one all the other parts of the team’s music had
come in. Below, the fire-setter had evidently met with ready success.
Passing up and
down the slope with the cuttings from ‘my’ zone, gave some interesting perspectives
on the different tools and techniques the scrub-cutters were using (loppers and
‘tree-poppers’ mostly) and varying ways of managing to work on the slope:
Further ingenuity was required when preparing for tea-break, to keep the trays on a
level:
There had
been neither bad parking on the part
of the driver of the landie, nor failure on part of picture-editor to
straighten the photograph. That vehicle
really is astride the Chilterns scarp.
By session
end, I could certainly see where I had been:
I hasten to
add that I had only literally – not metaphorically – been looking down on my
fellow-volunteers.
They too, by
the end of the morning, looked ready for a rest. I trust that was not in fact first-aid being
administered!
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