A busy weekend

The sky was clear for the first day all week as we embarked on our busiest volunteering weekend yet.

Teams of people arrived this weekend on Saturday and Sunday to continue marking a foot trail in the commercial forest, complete the first mountain bike trail (fingers crossed) , build a compost toilet and finish the shed for the allotments, make some repairs to the access track and of course make friends, get fit and have fun! We had volunteers aged 1 to 70 (well, I didn’t ask so I’m just guessing), including 2 BCLC Directors Christine McArthur and Sara Goss and 2 Bute Forest Directors Richard Matts and Ellen Lambert.

The mountain bike trail went well on both days, with the Saturday team completing 2 bridges and clearing the top stretch of trail and the Sunday team, including the Boys Brigade, finishing one bridge and making a good start on another, although I have to admit the preparation and consumption of hot chocolate rather dominated Sunday afternoons work!

Instead of chatting more, here’s a few images of the weekend instead – and don’t blame me for the number of bottom shots – Sara took on the important role of photographer!

Building with the Boys Brigade

The Boys Brigade, led by Raymond Deans, headed up the forest in February to make a start on our first mountain bike trail. I was hugely excited having walked the track with David Kilpatrick from the Bike Shed in Rothesay a few weeks before. Aidan, a teacher and Richard, one of our Directors and our volunteer Forester, came along to share their skills.

The lads were really keen, and helped out with every step of the process – collecting the timber, measuring the site, putting the first logs into place, nailing on the planks and covering the bridge with chicken wire.

They were keen to see where the full trails will go, so with much falling over and stepping into burns (particularly one young man – I shall name no names!), we walked up and down the trails talking about other places to bike and the continuous cover approach we are taking to managing the woodland we have. We had some debate about the grading of the trail, especially the red/black-possibly-even-orange trail which might need a bit more thought into how to downgrade the severity.

The lads learnt a lot in their afternoon, with many never having used a hammer and nails before and saying they would otherwise have spent their afternoon playing computer games (which led to a long discussion about the merits of various computer games!). They completed one bridge and almost completed a second -only 3 more to go!

What a difference a day makes…

I’ve had my fingers crossed so tightly for the last few days that the weather would be good that I almost couldn’t uncross mine to actually get stuck in when we had a day of light drizzle rather than relentless rain on Tuesday. Why was it an important day? Well, we had members of the Pheonix Centre or ‘Crew Pheonix’ as they prefer to be known coming along to help clear out and around the pond and regular volunteers and we had Channel 4 doing some research filming on the project and Karen from the Buteman. A busy day and of course despite staggering arrival times in the plan, everyone arrived at exactly the same time!

First thing was first – checking out the progress made whilst I’ve been slacking off. I’ve not been able to get up the forest for volunteering these last couple of weeks, so I was very pleasantly surprised to find the compost toilet virtually complete - hurrah! And quite beautiful it looks too… well, for a toilet. We shall have a ‘grand opening’ in the Easter school holidays.

The first to arrive, a group of our regular adult volunteers, got stuck in on the top pond area, clearing out branches and checking to see what wildlife they could find – absolutely nothing apart from loads of frog spawn which had sprung up since the afternoon before. After reassurances from our wildlife expert that the pond wouldn’t be able to support as many tadpoles as had already been spawned anyway and we wouldn’t disturb them if we were careful, we carried on, still making sure to disturb them as little as possible. (I popped back later when the group had moved onto another area to find the pond teeming with frogs going about their business having paid no attention to our ministrations whatsoever).

Crew Pheonix, Karen from the Buteman and C4 film maker then turned up all at the same time, creating a mini whirlwind of activity after an on-the-spot adjustment to our risk assessment determined a change of work area was needed. The team quickly sorted out access to the lower part of the pond and we all got stuck in – well those of us not learning how to start fires for sausage cooking anyway!

It was good to see Director Jim Mitchell finally getting his hands dirty too! (I’ll get a ‘oi’ from Jim for that comment no doubt.) Actually, he doesn’t know about it yet, but when he pulled out the final nail to ‘complete’ the compost toilet for the cameras, remarking ‘I’m getting all the credit for no work’, he was actually pulling out a rather vital part of the building – but I won’t tell anyone if you don’t.

Stephen from Crew Pheonix centre later gave me some great words of wisdom – when we work together, we’re a team, and being in a team makes him happy. I couldn’t agree more. Thanks everyone. The final photo doesn’t do justice to the difference we really made up there that day, but I can assure everyone that the treat of Hanne’s home-baked macaroons was very well deserved.