Land Manager's Diary: Read it here>

---

Six volunteers joined us on Monday on a beautiful day to help out in Gillside and Tongue Gill Woods at Grasmere. These are the woods that Friends of the Lake District manage in partnership with owners Bev and Jo Dennison. Our main task apart from taking breaks from the hot work to look at the stunning views was to take tree guards off the trees. Since being planted 8 or so years ago they have grown really well and the land feels like a woodland. But there are a lot of tubes to remove…and we mean a lot!
(Friends of the Lake District's use of plastic tree guards)

We put this workparty on as an extra to begin the long task of removing them, but how rewarding it was. You could feel the trees sigh as the tubes were removed and the trees could breathe again. Tube shapes of grass and green slime were not helping matters in some cases.

By lunchtime we had accumulated quite a stash of tubes and stakes, hopefully that can be resused on another property or by another group. So if anyone knows of anyone wanting tubes or stakes, please let us know and we can sort something out. 

The wood also contains the Tongue Gill hydro power station, put in by Bev and Jo at a similar time to the tree planting. Bev monitors the flows every day via his mobile phone and can tell if there are any issues with flows straight away.

One of the things he has to do regularly is brush off all the debris from the screen that lets the water through to go down the pipe to the turbine. As we sat having lunch by the beck we noticed that the screen had quite a bit of debris so we gave it a clean to save Bev a job! Really just an excuse to get hot feet into the beck, heaven… 

We are having a public open day on Wed 17^th August when Bev will show us the hydro and how it works, and Trevor from Grasmere Red Squirrels will tell us all about the red squirrels in the wood. Definitely a date for the diary. The next Gillside workparty is 17^th October when the bracken has died down. Again another diary date as we need all the help we can to take off more tubes. No skills, equipment or training needed!

Follow this link to see our full schedule of workparties in 2022>