Prepping for fencing
There’s been a recent decision by the Gloucestershire Wildlife Trust to renew the fencing around the species rich grassland in the new wetland reserve at Whitminster. There will be a new friday work party team over the next few months to work on the tasks to get this done.
Today it was Pete, Diane and myself who surveyed the initial task and started some of the scrub clearance around the existing fence line. The funding requires a very specific spec of fence, and in particular there will be some pretty hefty tensioning posts with mortice jointed supports.
This meant that the dense hawthorn and other trees would have to be quite severely pruned back to give the teams plenty of space to work and get the fence built properly.
The existing fence is not really stock proof, so it was removed and the barbed wire saved for other projects, along with the old posts.
So most of the day for me was sawing and lopping the branches back and storing in a habitat pile further in the woodland. There’ll be some brush cutting next time to finish off the area, otherwise it is good to go. We’ve at least established a methodology for both clearing the area and deciding where to place the new posts.
So a new winter project for fridays which should be fun.
