Mam Tor / Edale " Mega" weekend

15 volunteers including four who live in Ireland! stayed for the weekend at the "Dale Head" base camp near Edale.  We were joined during the days by local NT staff and volunteers and one or two of our own group who came out either on the Saturday or the Sunday.  Our volunteers gave about 165 volunteer hours to the Trust during the weekend - though the exact figure will depend on how you calculate breaks!  We spent the days working in a patch of woodland near Mam Tor.

It was a complicated worksite with different groups doing different things.  Most people changed tasks periodically.

Alex (the careership warden) allocated our tasks which were - collecting and burning brash, pruning, measuring, and collecting harvested timber.   The staff with the appropriate knowledge and training were felling trees, taking the side branches off, cross cutting the trunks into logs, and driving the "soft track"

The net result for the wood we were in (just up hill from the National Trust Mam Tor car park) were as follows.

1) Some selected trees (mostly pine)were felled, and converted into logs. These logs were to be a specific length that can be transported by helicopter - hence the volunteers measuring. Eventually these logs will be used to block gulleys in the peat - helping to control erosion, elsewhere in the High Peak Estate. The logs were loaded by volunteers into the soft track - driven into open ground, unloaded and stacked to await collection by the helicopter.

2) Volunteers with bow saws pruned off the lower branches of standing trees up to head height. A task sometimes known as brashing - This allows trees to be inspected more easily, allows a little more light down to ground level and makes the wood look far more "open".

3) The felling and pruning generates more side branches / dead wood on the ground "brash" that is normal / required for biodiversity - so a proportion of this material was dragged to a fire and burnt.

4) Some brash was left in habitat piles.

Bollard straightening... 3 April 2011 Dunham Massey

In the deer park at Dunham Massey, near the stables restarant there is a line of octagonal posts, with chains along the top. There is a theory that they date from arround the time that the National Trust took over the maintainance of the park.

Children play on the chains and over time a number of the posts have begun to lean in odd dirrections. So the task for today was to correct as far as possible these posts, without making too much of a mess.

Seven volunteers turned out, took the turf off arround the posts, dug down 18-24 inches, straightened the posts - and in some cases moved them back into line, and then back filled the holes firming the soil in layers. We are told that there is evidence to suggest that this boundary was at some stage marked by wrought iron "parkland" fence, looking at the layout on the ground we suspected that this would have been curved.

The weather was in general favourable, though we ducked into the mill at lunch time to avoid a heavy slow moving shower.