Kick Start volunteering

Volunteering on the Eastern Moors was kick started on Sunday with a highly successful Volunteer Taster Day.  Aiming to recruit willing and enthusiastic volunteers to help with the mammoth task of looking after the magnificent Eastern Moors, the taster day led the team well on their way to achieving their goal.

35 members of the public turned out on the cold but sunny day, and brought along with them their energy and desire to help!  Many spent either a half or full day, having a go at small tree felling in Curbar Woods with Senior Warden, Kim Strawbridge, and surveying habitats on Big Moor with Projects Manager, Rachel Bennett.

The Eastern Moors team are delighted by the response and now have a long list of people wanting to find out more about volunteering.  From practical conservation tasks to improving visitor infrastructure, delivering family events and adult learning to developing websites and social media, surveying visitor perception to designing ‘invisible’ interpretation, carrying out species surveying to monitoring vegetation structure; the volunteering opportunities are endless.

If you think you might like to volunteer with the Eastern Moors team, contact us to find out more.  Email enquiries@easternmoors.org.uk

http://www.easternmoors.org.uk/get-involved/index.html

Dig it!

This weekend saw us join forces with Sheffield Wildlife Trust and their group of regular volunteers for a day out at Wimble Holme Hill to start work on the bridleway improvements. 

The Wimble Holme Hill bridleway links Totley Moor with Blacka Moor and the improvement in the route will help to create a better connection between these moors.

Clearing mud off the track

The volunteers got really stuck in, digging the ground to fill in ruts, installing revetment boards on the steepest section of the track and doing the ground work in preparation for the surfacing stone that will be added over the next few weeks.

Over the coming weeks we will be working with a variety of groups on the Wimble Holme Hill improvements. Ride Sheffield mountain biking group are with us on a dig day this coming Sunday, the National Trust Longshaw volunteer group the ‘Mudlarks’ will be helping out for a day and a final day with the group from Sheffield Wildlife Trust will take place later on in the month.

A detailed plan of the improvement works can be seen on our website in the ‘what we do’ section.

Peak Climbing Club

Crag Clearance

 

On Sunday Rachel and myself spent a great day on the crags with the Peak Climbing Club, climbing you would assume. No, the club, supported through the British Mountaineering Council are helping with the woodland plan for the Eastern Moors.

 

Following on from a day last year, the club have been working their way along the crag clearing birch saplings from the rock face itself. Sections of the crag, particularly around the north end of Curbar, are now very wooded. This has led to more mossy damp covering of the rocks. Letting the light back in will help the rare lichens on the rock, help prevent birch seed blowing up onto the moors, replace the edge as a landscape feature and improve the quality and conditions for climbing.

 

The Eastern Moors team and the National Trust estate team are currently working in the woodlands below, clearing trees to create more light to promote the growth of oak and rowan. So the Idea is to help the woodland regenerate new growth not to reduce the amount of woodland on the Eastern Moors.

 

Dead bay grove area has gone from dank and dark to dappled shade. More work is due in these areas with the Eastern Moors Partnership team following on behind. We achieved more than I had hoped, finishing under the pinnacle at Froggatt.

 A big thanks to David and the club for all their help and the biggest slices of cake I have ever seen.

 Danny.

Up, up and away....

There is not a lot you can do when Kinder has ‘got it’s hat on’ but at 8:30am the call came through to get on over to Edale as it was clear enough to fly. After waiting weeks for a break in the weather we were finally able to lend a hand to the National Trust Estate team working on the Kinder restoration project. Kitted up with plenty of warm clothes, flasks and wellies we arrived at the National Trust office for our safety briefing with Steve the team supervisor and then joined the rest of the guys and headed over to the lift site at Dalehead. Within minutes the helicopter appeared on the skyline, it landed in the field so we grabbed our gear and were directed in by Steve while the ground crew set up. Then we were up and away, leaving the green Edale valley for Kinder. Flying over the blanket bog the scale of the damage and the need for restoration was obvious.

Some of the first bags of the day to be dropped

Damage has created a dramatic landscape of erosion gullies, where bare peat is being washed away. The aim of our mission was to fly stone up to Kinder and build dams within these gullies to slow down the flow of water and to trap the peat. This will slow down the erosion giving plants such as cotton grass a chance to colonise with the long term aim of stopping the erosion once the vegetation has recovered.

Steve showing Harriet the volunteer how to guide in the helicopter

Within minutes Chris the pilot was back with the first load of stone which he dropped off guided in by Steve. Each load is just under half a tonne and they are dropped by markers which had already been placed by Steve and the team. We then started emptying the bags and building dams, normally one bag does one dam. The turn around time for the helicopter is short with just 4 minutes between drops, needless to say our dam building didn’t keep up to that pace. Over the day we managed to get 50 bags dropped off and about one third of the dams built. By 3:30pm the sun started getting low so Chris and Steve decided it was time to call it a day. We gathered all our gear and hopped back into the helicopter for a lift back down to the valley, a brilliant 2 minute trip which would have taken us an hour to walk. We had a brilliant day with the team learning about the work going on up there as well as being able to contribute a bit of labour, once you get shifting stone you soon realise you don’t need quite so many layers on!

For more information on the work the National Trust are doing on Kinder visit

http://www.kinder-scout.co.uk/restoration-work.html

Ground Beetle Drawing Competition

More fantastic winners from Bakewell's Science, People and the National Park event.  Well done to all the budding artists who took part.