Orchard guardians and apprentice path builders.

I’ve just had one of those brilliant weeks that convince me that I have one of the best jobs in the world.  The weather has been very diverse and one day, as I continued my checks of the old mine sites, I found myself above low-lying cloud.  The pictures give you a sense of what that looks like but there’s nothing quite like actually being there.

Regular readers of the blog will know about our long-term project to upgrade the path around Derwentwater to access-for-all standard.  We have now embarked on the next phase of that and I recently made a field visit with a group of National Park apprentices and their supervisor plus The National Park’s Rights of Way Officer.  One of the discussion topics was what we have learned from our experience a couple of years ago of installing a recycled plastic boardwalk   Plastic performs quite differently from wood with temperature change and requires different expansion joints.

The apprentices are going to adopt a stretch of the path on the western shore as one of their projects.  The Park Authority will finance it and the apprentices will carry out the job.  So they are now working on drawing up plans and specifications and, once they have been cleared with me, they will get to work.  This is a collaboration where we all benefit.

I’ve also been to Watendlath on a visit with children from Borrowdale School.  Beside one of the Watendlath farms there is a long-disused community orchard that we hope to restore - it is the walled space in the centre of the picture above.  They have adopted the orchard as part of the Trust’s Guardianship Scheme.  On the day of their visit there had been an overnight snowfall.  Watendlath is a hanging valley approached up a steep hill so I checked the road condition early in the morning.  It was obvious that the snow and ice patches might be difficult for a minibus so we ferried the children there in our four-wheeled drive vehicles and the teacher’s Landrover.  Two trips successfully took us all to where we wanted to be and greatly enhanced their enjoyment. 

They did a huge amount of work and have now surveyed the orchard and devised a plan for the work they will be doing to care for it. (One of the Trust’s experts in heritage fruit varieties will be visiting to identify existing plantings and advise on their care.) The children also met Helen who has lived all her life in Watendlath and she was telling them tales of when her parents first married and moved into the valley.  For the children, this is history being told by someone who was there.  Showing them that they can have fun as they care for their surroundings is exactly what we want to do and they certainly enjoyed that day.