Season’s Greetings!

Season’s Greetings!  It’s been raining here for days rather than snowing this year, but plodding through the mud in my little tractor doesn’t make for quite the same picture somehow.  If you are having a break – I hope you have a good one whereever you are.

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BBC Countryfile visits the Lynchmere Commons

Just a quick post to get around my continuing writer’s block which seems to have prevented me from posting on almost anything for months now.

The winter working season is in full swing on the Lynchmere commons now. Back in November a film crew from the BBC programme Countryfile spent a day with a group of our volunteers while we were working on Stanley Common and the programme went out on the 2nd December.

If you missed it and want to see what we got upto then this link should take you to the BBC Iplayer ( sadly I think this is only available for IP addresses in the UK) and it’s probably only available until Sunday 9th December. The section on the commons starts at around 20 minutes into the programme.

We were cutting scrub encroaching upon part of the restored common and as usual we were trying to use as much of the cut material as we could. We  threaded (taking the branches off with a bill hook) the straight birch poles and put them to one side for stakes and binders for a  hedgelaying project. After a lunch cooked on the dire I made  a besom broom with John Craven who immediately put it to good use. And yes I am looking for a new test pilot!

As you might imagine it was quite hectic to get everything organised for the day and the time flew past. All in all we had a productive day’s work as well as filming and thanks to the weather we all enjoyed it – I think it’s given us plenty to talk about since just about everyone who turned up ended up on film in one way or another.

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