The Green Man Trail, and formative pruning

Philip, Geoff and Guy relax before the rain.

Philip and Guy have been trying to establish this weekend as an annual event and walk. The Green man trail is a proposed walk route that takes you up to the top of Pasture Wood above Marsden. It gives a brilliant view of the head of the Colne Valley. At least, it does on a day which isn't beset by low cloud and rain, in August! The weather was shockingly bad. It should have been a lovely celebratory moment, when we could look around the valley and see thousands of trees which the society has planted over the years. But we did our best in adverse circumstances, we had cake, and shared a bottle of wine. Later on, Philip, Guy and I walked down to Netherwood, and did a bit of light formative pruning there, before ending the evening in more relaxed and social manner. Beer, obviously.

Philip formatively prunes a tree.

Merrydale and Scouts

Heidi and Lisa standing proudly next to their pile of collected guards, and looking wet.

In his capacity as a Scout Leader Duncan took a group of Scouts up Merrydale and got them to take off stakes and guards from the grown trees. Heidi and Lisa turned out to help. Philip was away bracken bashing at High Wood. By all accounts it was a wet, wet Thursday evening.

Merrydale - Lord of the flies

See the flies on Simon's hat, see Geoff, fly-less. Why?

So, this morning we were up Merrydale, a lovely little valley that runs away to the west north west of Slaithwaite. The site has some semi-ancient natural woodland, and this was supplemented with new planting some years ago. We were back there today to remove guards and retrieve stakes for re-use. Problem was, flies! Flies, flies damn flies. You can see them all over my hat in the pic. Other than that it was delightful up there. And the bilberry bushes are weighed down with big juicy fruit too, so lots of jam this year. We gathered 175 stakes for re-use, saving us £70 or £80. We also took a similar number of the old guards off site. Apricot and walnut cake today. Very good.

Duncan, Neil and Heidi, emerging from the new growth.                                                                                                  Heidi handing round the cake

The Annual General Meeting

As usual this took place at the Sair. 2 hours of heated debate about health and safety and working with children and young people policies. Had to be done. I recorded the whole thing on my MP3 player, so if anyone would like a podcast of it I could oblige. The recording made writing the minutes a lot easier, and more accurate, than usual.