It was more tree felling and pruning along the trail again. The valley that the trail runs along used to be a home to many printworks. Sacks and other items from the Manchester cotton trade would find their way here to have the name of coal merchants or whatever printed on the side. The whole of the valley between the village at one end and the town at the other contained a succession of printworks. Printing required large volumes of water in order to wash away dyes, so in addition to the various factory buildings, there is a string of old "lodges", or small reservoirs. In the passage of time, some buildings have been demolished, others converted into light industrial use. The pools, however, remain, and I have been told contain some interesting stocks of fish. Fishing rights pertain in some of the pools.
Quite a lot of trees have been cleared in the last few weeks. I found myself wondering if a point might be reached when the optimum number of trees are left, and work will focus on other areas. The construction of the old railway line involved cutting out of rock in some places and banking up in others (obviously!) We were working in an area which was a bank, meaning that on one side the land drops away quite steeply to the valley below where there are a lot of light industrial buildings. The bank was riddled with animal holes, old and new. One of them was a new one, and one of the wardens working with us today said he had found a dead badger cub in the entrance the previous day. We had a look for it, but there was no sign, so we concluded that Mrs Brock had removed it elsewhere, or possibly eaten it. It was suggested that it might have been the runt of the litter. There is a website, http://www.badgerland.co.uk/main.html, which claims that the badger is the most popular British mammal. I spent quite a bit of time reading this. Badger setts involve a tunnel, with one or many entrances, which lead to a sleeping area. They also have a tunnel which ends in a latrine. Clever! It continues, "A really big sett can have from 50 to 100 or more entrance holes. A sett this big will have been dug out by lots of badgers, over many years. There are some setts which are known to be over a hundred years old. Many generations of badgers have lived in these setts.". So back on our bank, the warden wasn't sure if some of the holes were badgers or rabbits, but they looked quite big to me. At any rate, this made an interesting diversion. Badgers are heavily protected, so it is illegal to kill a badger unless under an official cull. We were not to work within - 30 metres? - of the sett, in order not to disturb them.
This week I was acting as lookout, and in clearing away the brush once the tree was down. The chainsaw man cuts the tree into so-called manageable bits, but some of these are quite large branches which are quite heavy. Dragging these through the undergrowth, to put them down the slope was hard work. I asked at one point whether they ever sell firewood. But no, nothing is ever removed. The brush is left to rot. The rationale is to speed up the process of forest ageing and renewal, which encourages biodiversity.
What is interesting to me is how little time is actually spent "in the field". The first hour of the day, the guys sit in the office and catch up with emails and paperwork. Before we go out, the landrover is loaded with equipment. Tools, in particular the chainsaw, need to be sharpened. Then there is travelling time to get to where we are to work. And time whilst everything is set up. I have noticed that the work proceeds at a steady pace, with frequent breaks to talk to members of the public. But I reckon that the actual work that gets done is no more than about four hours each day. But given that the work is physically demanding, this seems about right. This is one part of the public service that doesn't appear to have targets (number of trees cut? items of equipment maintained?). Thank heavens for that.
No comments:
Post a Comment