Photos from the High Weald Landscape Trail

This post is pretty much all photos, in the order I took them walking along the High Weald Landscape Trail last weekend, starting on the Rye side of the river Rother and finishing near Tenterden - about 8.5 miles. There's some nice ones of a Buzzard soaring near the middle, and some pretty woodland at the end.

My Dad took this one:

Mike

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Building a culvert in the woods

Today I put in a culvert in the wood with my Dad's help. It's in the track to Sweep Wood, at a spot where a seasonal stream flows across the path, which in the past has made it difficult to get past there on foot sometimes, and doesn't help when we need to drive in there to collect logs either.

We started by digging a trench for the pipe I'd bought:

Then where it crosses the tyre tracks, we dug out a pit on either side:

In each pit we put some bricks stacked up, with other rubble round them:

then laid reinforced concrete slabs over the top:

At each side is a small retaining structure made of bricks:

and on top of the bricks we put some heavy Alder logs to hold the soil back:

On the upstream side there's also a sump, to collect silt:

Here it is all covered over, and ready to walk and drive over:

While we were there, we also cut a drainage channel through the bank at the side, next to where a lot of water collected in the winter:

and used the soil from that to raise the level of the lowest part of the ride a little bit:

Hopefully these two changes will make the path easier for us to use, and for all the walkers using the footpath as well.

We did one other little job while we were there - cutting some slices out of one the the Sycamores we felled in January:

My Dad's going to take them and hopefully make small tables from them...

Mike

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All the trees are growing!

My parents are visiting, and yesterday we took a walk in Sweep Wood to see how it's getting on after our two winters coppicing there. And it's looking great!

All the trees we cut last winter are growing again now, here's Sweet Chestnut, Hornbeam and Alder:

The year-old trees are doing well too, here's some Ash back in leaf:

And of course, until the trees grow back to close the canopy, everything on the ground is going crazy:

Compare this to a similar bit of the wood a few years ago:

Quite a difference, eh?

Here's another one from a few years ago:

but this area doesn't look so different yet for ground flora, as we only just cut it - it'll need another year's growth to change visibly.

The bluebells have just started to pass their peak in this part of the wood now, so here's a few photos, as there may not be many more.

The ride between Sweep Wood and Chestnut Coppice is looking pretty good too:

and not far from there is some Hawthorn in bloom - a bit later than the ones you might have seen in hedgerows, as it's shaded to some extent. But once again, there's a coppicing benefit here, as this is a tree that didn't flower at all until we cut along that ride:

One final exciting thing we saw, which bodes well for the summer, was hundreds of caterpillars on our crab apple tree. I'm no good at identifying them, so any help appreciated! They did an amazing job of looking like twigs:

Though when they do it on the edge of a leaf it's probably a bit less effective as camouflage:

Anyway, that's all for now. We walked some of the High Weald Landscape Trail today, so there'll be pics from that in due course...

Mike

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