Brush cutting at Couch Green
By Steve Jeffery, The Watercress Way Trustee
Today Mike, a fellow trustee, and myself met up at Couch Green on the Straight Mile to clear some overgrown vegetation and the area around one of our benches. This is all part of my duties as a trustee to keep the paths useable and look after the ecology. We are both trained in the use of brushcutter and hold LANTRA certificates to operate the machinery. A couple of hours work regularly in different sections of the way keep it under control.
We aren’t able to do clearance work between March and August as it the bird nesting season and not good practice to do so. Usually we take turns at cutting or raking, Mike was the raker today, we remove the cut material and dump it at the side to keep everything tidy and to return the nutrients to the ground. We have already decided the next area to be done quite close to this area.
Recently we have installed new benches to The Watercress Way and these need to be kept clear so that they are usuable. While we were on the Straight Mile we checked the way markers as in recent times some have unfortunately been defaced or scratched. Luckily the ones we replaced have been in place untouched for a couple of months now. We checked and topped up the leaflet boxes, which were all intact too, as these too have been past victims of being removed and smashed up.
It was a sunny morning and several people passed the time of day with us as they walked their dogs and got their daily exercise. When we had finished we took a walk up to where a lot of Ash trees had been cut down due to the devastating Ash die back disease. We were both surprised at how well the trees were regrowing with shoots coming out of the tops and ivy covering the outside, it all looked nice and promising. We remarked that new people visiting the walk would have no idea that the trees looked so stark and bare after they were brutally chopped down in their prime.
Steve Jeffery, Trustee
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