Tuesday was spent at the Hermitage; installing a new information board for the ice house and Himalayan balsalm pulling! A firm favourite for all!
The group split into two, with the eager Balsalm pullers getting their wellies on straight away and getting stuck in. The rest of us remained behind to install the new and improved sign for the ice house. While doing this we got to have a sneaky look inside…or at least as much as we could see with the tiny key-ring torch that Jess the ranger had on her. After our nosiness has been tended to, Derek set about clearing the doorway into the house whilst Martin and Rob began making two big holes for our sign to pop into. When two perfect holes had been dug the sign popped in perfectly and with a dab of postcrete the sign was installed to be admired and to educate for years ahead.
…then it was lunch time were all the Balsalm pullers returned with smiles…and nettle stings to show us.
After lunch we gathered the troops and marched up to the battle ground to show the Himalayan Balsalm who was boss. Annoyingly the Balsalm likes to grow on steep, muddy nettled filled slopes so it has a tiny advantage. This, however, did not faze us, especially Kate who managed to get from bottom to top removing a vast amount of the plant as she climbed. I on the other hand ended up at the bottom of a muddy slope a few times and not by choice! We battled on, and though there are sill areas that we did not reach, the Himalayan took a good beating, which we were all proud of! All-in-all a productive, happy day.
Come Wednesday we returned to Butterdean woods. Task for the day was clearing the drainage ditches which run on either side of the main path. Well….I say ‘run’ but in reality they are sufficently overgrown and silted up that there isnt much water in them – except in large pools behind dams. So, half the group went up one drain and the other half up the other – and much getting lost, losing people and tools occured. Mud was very much a requirement of the day – for me at any rate, although this always happens – the schloopy stuff, which brought back fond memoires of those bygone days at Polkemment pond. The schloopy stuff that you neatly cut four sides away and step back to dig it out – whereupon it sinks into the muddly oblivion, to reappear in an irksome fashion when someone else is watching.
Still, we had a pretty good hack at it – its is definately A LOT clearer than it was, and when Thursday’s group gets round to un-daming it, everybody had better STAND CLEAR!!
Dave had fun with his chrome, a sort of muddy Poseidon.
Lunch was spent on sitting on logs eating fudge (thanks David!!) and was on the whole fairly unadventful until Neasa, upon picking up a considerably large ‘biscuit’, went on to drop the biscuit box!! Alas! A sorry day. Then back on to the mud. Or should I say ‘in’…?
Obligutory nature walk in the afternoon resulted in Tommy finding a rare ‘Blackberry Tree’ and Willie still unable to identify a certain small pink, five petalled flower…ahh well…its only been a year these walks have been happening after all… Returned from the walk to collect Alan and Dave who had stuck (not literally) to working in the ditch, before returning to the van and Edinburgh.
On Thursday we were back at Butterdean, but to give it a bit of variation we switched from working in the boggy drainage channels and instead turned our hands to a spot of path creation. East Lothian rangers have decided to give up the drainage fight in certain areas of the wood and are instead leaving them to develop as natural wet woodland, this means that various paths around the area are to close and new ones are to open in order to protect these sites.
Half the group spent the morning trying to dig out roots and stumps that were lying along the new route, at the cost of only 1 mattock which lost its battle with a root. The other half spent their time searching for logs that we would be using to edge the path to give it a ‘rustic’ effect as well as sharpening smaller sticks that we would be using as stobs, to keep the edging in place. This group as you can imagine did look like they were going to war when a small stack of sharpened spears had been produced by lunchtime.
Lunch was spent sat on our newly forming path and, in a unbelievable show of commitment, Kate came out for a half day having already been in work in the morning. Half the group went off on a small nature walk led by Dave whilst the rest of put the world to rights in the sunAfter lunch we carried on lining the path with our logs and sharpened stakes and when we left in the afternoon we had turned what had been in the morning just overgrown woodland into a rustic nature trail ready to have its final layer of type 1 put down next week.