Dismantling a corral
Another Gloucestershire Wildlife Trust first for me again today – a work party in the Stuart Fawkes grassland reserve. Vicky picked me up and we headed over to Box to meet with the rest of the team at 10am.
The first task was locating the very rare Meadow Clary, a plant on the brink of extinction in the UK. It is present in the reserve and a lot of management with grazing has been undertaken to encourage it to spread.
The plant has started to flower, so should be easy to spot, and we found the first patch pretty quickly. Then nearby, we found some rosettes, not yet in flower.
The leaf has a distinctive rough texture and is broad. It could be mistaken for cowslip and knapweed, so there were a few false alarms.
We walked around three fields and located only 4 specimens sadly. Let’s hope that these set seed and spread around a bit next year.
After that rather pleasant hour and a half of walking around species rich meadow, we then set about the main task of the day – replacing a cattle corral which had become loosened over the years.
The plan was to remove the rails and the upright fence posts on the field side. The far side was in good condition – possibly not under so much pressure from cattle near the wall.
The posts were in deep. It was quite some effort with wrecking bar and spades to dig a deep enough hole around the post to pull them out. I worked with Rupert on one of the square gate posts which must have been a good 90cm deep. But the post itself was showing signs of rot, so it needed to come out. It took a good half hour and more to fully extract it from the ground.
I then set to work at an ajoining post which had snapped while being removed, but the bottom part of the post still needed to be dug out. We’ll be installing the new posts in more or less the same position, so the old debris needs to be removed.
There wasn’t really an easy way to dig this out. The ground was stony, so a combination of mattock and wrecking bar was used to slowly chip away at the stump. By the time we were ready to go at 2pm, I reckon there was still a good 20cm to go.
