A couple of weeks ago, the wonderful Wednesday workers were headed off to Meadows Yard Nature reserve in Seafield. This is a somewhat indecisive site, having been a meadow, then having railway sidings built on it, before becoming allotments and then finally settling on a Nature Reserve, managed by the City of Edinburgh Council. The site has a diverse range of habitats, from wildflower meadow, a small woodland area and scrubland, important for a range of birds. There is also a small pond and marsh area with a variety of amphibians living in it.
Today was very much a loppers and bow saw day; with the job being to cut back some of the vegetation that was growing up around the paths. In some cases, the hedges and trees had grown up so much, that the paths were starting to look more like tunnels to another dimension.
The day started excellently, when we managed to leave Euan behind at the pickup point, necessitating an extra trip round Edinburgh City Centre to go back around and pick him up again, which did wonders for Driver Dave’s stress levels. After arrival on site and the obligatory cup of tea and biscuit, Dave revealed his secret weapon,a set of loppers on a long pole, operated by string. After this, we set to work, chopping and sawing and lopping back branches, turning the dark black pits of despair into lovely, wonderful tunnels of light and hope. Slightly unusually, however, instead of just heaping the cuttings up in a nice out of the way place, the rangers wanted them stacked in the middle of another path, to thwart a certain citizen of Edinburgh who had apparently taken to riding around the reserve on a quad-bike.
Unusually for this year, we had a nice warm sunny day, and a good day was had by all and hopefully as a result of our efforts to open the paths up, it will encourage users of the reserve to explore other areas of it.