The health benefits of getting outdoors seem
to be seriously in vogue at the moment.
My own village has just opened a ‘fresh-air
gym’, which is meant for “youths and adults”:
Despite the fierce notice – “This is NOT children’s
play equipment” – inevitably
it has been much clambered over by small persons.
They have explored all the playground-possibilities to be had from fixed
exercise-equipment, while grown-ups had to wait their turn to have a go.
Also in the last week, there was a research
paper published on the efficacy, and dosage required, of self-administered NE
therapy (‘nature experience’). This was widely
covered in the British press. According
to the study, “The efficiency of a nature pill per time expended was greatest
between 20 and 30 min, after which benefits continued to accrue, but at a
reduced rate.” (‘Urban Nature Experiences Reduce Stress in the Context of Daily Life Based on Salivary Biomarkers’
– Mary Carol R Hunter, Brenda W Gillespie, Sophie Yu-Pu Chen, Frontiers in Psychology, 4 April 2019)
NE was defined for the purposes of the study
as “spending time in an outdoor place that brings a sense of contact with
nature, at least three times a week for a duration of 10 min or more.” A Green-Gym session lasts considerably longer
than that – though we don’t do much sitting around, and certainly not all day long. Nevertheless, Green Gym could
be designated one of our three ‘nature experiences’ a week, alongside the daily
five portions of fruit & veg, eight glasses of water (or tea, coffee …) a
day, etc?
For an efficacious NE, the researchers found,
“You
don’t have to travel to the wildlands.”
Which was just as well really, for today we travelled no further than a nearby
village.
The main
priority there was a freshly re-opened footpath. The line of the path had been cleared by a local ramblers’ group, under the direction
of an Oxfordshire County Footpaths Officer. Our task was to make it more pleasant to use.
The first thing to do was to have a coorie
for potential targets.
– Another new OED word there. ‘Coorie’, noun
or verb, Scots: ‘search, hunt, stalk’.
Green-Gym vocabulary is ever expanding, though we probably won’t have
much use for what one of our volunteers clearly thought was a newly minted term
(but actually Americans have got there first): ‘bloomage’.
There were some interesting splashes of
colour – all right, bloomage – around us, on what was otherwise rather a grey
day. Bluebells and forsythia we can
identify. Can anyone help with naming
these?
From the newly-installed public-footpath sign
at one end, Green-Gymmers worked their way up the stretch of new path,
smoothing and beautifying the way:
Some volunteers clearly found larger targets
to tackle than others, and needed to deploy a range of tools. I think the loppers in the snap proudly recorded
by one Green-Gymmer below are just for size comparison!
Towards the top end of the path was an old
post which needed removing. First one
volunteer had a go, then called for reinforcements. Two strong men then pulled and heaved, and
levered …
… to no avail. Then it was three people on the job:
At last, result! and the inevitable posing for
pictures, with the prize ‘catch’ before it was taken to the brash pile:
After that, besides the need for refreshment,
it was time to collect up tools and re-group:
In the second half of the session, some
volunteers turned their attention to the driveway leading up to the allotments –
limited, of course, by having to look out for, and skirt round, ‘live’ birds’
nests:
Others donned hi-vis and returned to the
roadway which runs parallel to the newly refurbished footpath. This was where we had done our first
Green-Gym job in that village.
Again there was encroaching vegetation to cut
back, more dead wood to be removed, and dying wood to be freed from the grip of
ivy. Here a volunteer has a handsaw to old
projecting roots, which were to be trimmed level with the ground:
Thankfully the rain which was forecast to
turn heavy at mid-day did no such thing.
There was, however, enough of the wet stuff around to mean that today’s ‘after’
pictures are not the most spectacular:
