Lyme Park workday on Sunday 19th September

Twelve of us met Issy, one of the Lyme Rangers, in the main car park at Lyme Park at 9.30am today.

As we were working towards to far end of West Drive, most of us moved our cars to the car park nearest to where we'd be working and walked down West Drive, noticing that Contractors had been in to cut down the Ash tree's due to Ash die-back.

Whilst the big trunks and branches of the Ash would need a chain-saw to further cut them down, the smaller branches, twigs and leaves had fallen into the river that ran along the length of West Drive, blocking it so the water couldn't flow properly. The concern was that, once the heavy rains came, all this debris would be washed further downstream into the gardens of Lyme's neighbours causing blockages and floods. Our task today was to clear as much of this debris as possible, burn what we could and the smaller bits could be piled up on the other side of the path into habitat piles, behind the fencing or where the brambles would grow through it, making it stable when the rain came, so it didn't wash away.

Andy started the fire, and a few of us stayed near it so we could cut down the branches that we being retrieved from the steam and brought up West Drive, to load onto the fire and get it going properly. 

Carrying the debris up West Drive to the fire site.

The weather was kind to us - although showers had been forecast, they had finished before we arrived at Lyme and we had good weather while we were there. Lots of people walked past us while we were working and stopped for a chat, which was great.

After lunch, when we'd cleared up one stretch of the steam, we moved further down the Drive and started on another area.

Before we started...... 

......during.....

....and after:-)

We let the fire die down a bit and cleared as much as we could before we finished around 3pm, gathering our tools, and walking uphill back to our cars!

It was a really satisfying day, particularly being able to see the difference we'd made:-)

Thanks to Christine and Adrian for the photos.