18th January 2024: Virtual Tours, Training Opportunities and Property Guides Land Manager's Diary: Read it here> BOOK onto one our upcoming workparties> From the heady sunshine at the start of the week, by Tuesday, we are looking out of the window to increasingly thicker snow… it was a good decision to cancel the walling workparty at Mazonwath which should have been held on Tuesday this week. The safety of our volunteers is paramount and with a lot of single track road driving and being nearly 1000 feet up, it was a good decision. It is good to have an extra day to crack on with lots of exciting work regarding Friends of the Lake District’s land. We will shortly be launching a further 6 virtual tours, allowing you to look at aerial footage of our properties and dig deeper if you want more information via videos or website links. Work will then begin on the last suite of tours which will take most of the year to produce. In tandem with that we are finalising prototype leaflets so that each property will have its own property guide, plus other themed guides, such as on trees, lichen, hay meadow flowers etc. The first ones will be High Borrowdale, and also a guide to upland hay meadow flowers and over the course of the next couple of years we should cover each property and the key things to look for. All the guides will be available online, and accessible from the properties via mobile technology and QR codes or NFC chips. The volunteer training programme is also being finalised with the first event being in late March looking at bryophyte ID which is now available for booking> Others planned cover woodland archaeology, bees, mammals, funghi and hopefully fossils and geology. We will be opening up the full programme for booking next month for those people who are happy to be trained for free, and then use their new skills to help us survey our land and learn more about it. On top of all that there are the usual tasks of issuing grazing lets to our graziers, weekly workparties to sort, and looking ahead to budget requirements on the land for the next budget year in April onwards, what is needed where and which contractors. If the snow does stop, this month is a great time to look at lichens – once our natty guide to lichens is finished, you can head out with it… Next workparty, weather permitting is the Helm on Wednesday 24th January when we will be finishing rabbit wiring the enclosures and possibly tree planting. You can book here> Manage Cookie Preferences