In July, we worked on Orford Ness, a shingle spit formerly used by the armed forces for various purposes – one being the testing of atomic weapon components. The “island” is covered with stones, birds, mysterious military structures, unexploded ordnance…and, in places, ragwort. We stuck to eliminating the last of these (since CNTV don‘t specialise in mine clearance), and were assigned a patch amongst some ruined buildings under the supervision of the warden, Dave. On the Sunday, we were lucky enough to have Dave give us a guided tour of the whole site.
Andy has more details, and more pictures.
We had quite a variety of tasks this weekend. The first was to remove silt and sticks from a pond close to the Bridgewater Monument. Since we ended up finishing that task by lunchtime, we spent the afternoon taking in the hills around the property, which included the highest point in the Chilterns – Ivinghoe Beacon. Sunday morning saw us installing a fence around a deep pit dug into a site of geological interest.
(Alison B. writes:) The task was to remove two screens on either side of a small bird hide and replace with two new screens constructed of hazel. The old screens were a few years old, falling down and spouting new growth! Our task was to put up new screens, made by putting in new stake posts and weaving willow into screens.
The warden gave us a brief idea of what he wanted, and left us to our own devices. The easy bit was taking down the old screens, which easily fell apart. Following several (slightly heated!) discussions we decided on the best way to construct the new screens and set to. On either side of the “hide shelter” we put in a double row of new stakes, at intervals, and in between each double stake, we put in a single stake. Then we used long, slender hazel branches, and weaved these in and out of the stakes. At regular height intervals, we roped the double row of stakes together, to keep the weaved hazel in place. The result – two new screens which looked very smart and were highly praised by the NT warden.
This was a bit of an unusual project for us as it wasn't based at a National Trust site, but at the Iron Age ring ditch at Wandlebury, a scheduled ancient monument. We helped conserve the structure by removing scrubby vegetation from the site.
Paul H. captured a timelapse video of the works as well as still images. Tom H. also took some pictures of the activity.