A grassland slope with some scrub trees removed on the upper part

Miserden Mud

A work party over in the beautiful Miserden Estate with Glorious Grasslands today. This is the first time I’ve been on this site, although various work has been carried out here by the project in the past.

The weather forecast had promised that the rain would clear by 10am, but it was raining hard when I arrived. Luckily I spotted Chris who was parking up in a layby, rather than take the chance of getting stuck in the mud by the field gate.

The site was a beautiful grassland on a north facing slope opposite an SSSI. There were quite a few single standing hawthorn trees which were shading the grassland, so the mission today was to remove them from as wide an area as possible.

A large dead hedge next to a track
Stacking the arisings for collection

The major challenge was where to stack the considerable arisings from the cutting. We didn’t want to create a dead hedge on the bank itself, so we decided in the end to leave them next to the track at the top of the bank, hopefully for collection by the land owner at some point.

This made a tough task tougher, having to drag the material uphill on a muddy slope. I decided not to cut a single branch today – having one person less cutting would make everything a bit more achievable. So I focussed instead on dragging and stacking as the rest of the team removed the trees.

They were a particularly tangled and vicious set of hawthorn trees. Thorns were piercing gloves and skin on a regular basis, and quite a bit of manual branch cutting was required before the chainsaw could take out the stump down to ground level.

The middle part of the day wasn’t too bad from a weather point. We managed to have a couple of breaks in the dry, but it started to pour again in the final hour. One of those days where everything just gets covered in mud.

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