in the footsteps of Valentine Morris

Golly, I've been absent.

The accumulation of long shifts, visiting family and having my son over has kept me so busy that I've had to neglect my cyber-life for a while. This happens now and again. Things have slowed down enough for me to share my volunteer work in conservation once more, as requested by a few of you foolhardy souls.

On Thursday we returned to the Piercefield estate, forming part of the Wye Valley Walk. Back in the 18th century, a young landowner named Valentine Morris saw the value in building a scenic walk with fabulous viewpoints for the 'in crowd' of the 1730's and beyond. The trendy youth of the day were encouraged to trek and cavort amongst the greenery and scenery of the time. The intervening centuries, not to mention Mother Nature, have wreaked havoc with his ideals and we have been tasked with helping to restore some of his work. So it was that I drove to the meeting point and met up with ten other willing hands.

I knew from the itinery posted to me that Thursday would consist mainly of decapitating swathes of rampant Laurel, planted by Valentine Morris to frame the wonderful views he had created over the valley so long ago and since left to become enormously invasive to the indigenous flora in this woodland arena. The various councils have wrangled hard on the matter of the Laurel in question. Purist conservationists state that Laurel does not hold any ecologically diversive benefits to the landscape and is a useless oversees invader, added by Valentine and thus being a contrived nuisance. In contrast, the archeologists on the panel stated that the Laurel should stay, as it repesented the thinking and style of Georgian England at that time and to destroy it would take away the essence of the restoration work being undertaken. I am a conservationist at heart and would sorely love to see the Laurel ripped out and replaced by something native and richly beneficial for our wildlife. However, I can also see the value in retaining our history as it was played out. Perhaps the best outcome possible was decided; to cut back the Laurel and keep it managed but to leave it in place, as designed by Mr. Morris 270-odd years ago.

We drove to open land consisting of rolling downs, situated at the back of Chepstow racecourse and watched over by the haggard ruins of a once great country house. Whether it was part of the original Piercefield estate I am not sure, though I expect so as its age is about the same as Morris' designed landscape. What I DO know is that the Yanks came over here during the second World War and pasted the beJesus out of it with live ammo to hone their fighting skills. This did little to enhance it's age-worn destitution. Picture a block of Swiss cheese three storeys high and with Rooks and Pigeons perched all over it and you've got a decent image of this ruin. We walked on from here for a few minutes and entered light woodland. Here, we found a path. This was part of the Wye Valley walk and it brought us to the Grotto and the villainous Laurel. We began our work, each armed with sturdy, long-handled secateurs and I also wore a saw in a scabbard at my hip. Proper Indiana Jones, I was. As we started to cut the Laurel back from the walking track and into the border where it belonged, it commenced to pour down. Good timing, O Gods of the weather. I was wet through in about two minutes. Even my underwear became something damp and displeasing. So biblical became the downpour, that our leader (Sarah) called a halt and we all huddled into the grotto for shelter. It felt strange to imagine the merry, nay drunken, conversations that must have taken place exactly where I was standing, but nearly three centuries before my birth. And what would they have made of our bedraggled group? The rain passed as suddenly as it had come and, gently steaming, we began to work again. The Laurel was actually soon cleared. This revealed to some of us a curious and pallid looking plant that looked like an explosion of popcorn on a stalk. Sarah told us that it was 'Toothwort', a plant that doesn't photosynthisise but lives a semi-parasitic life on Yew and Hazel trees, flowering in a ghostly way in the spring. After the Laurel was severed back into submission, we made a determined effort to move away stacks of logs of felled Yew trees, sacrificed in the name of ecological management as they had encroached upon the grotto and path. This took about three hours, with a soggy lunch-break thrown in where we all perched on mossy logs to eat and cultivate haemorrhoids together. When we had done, the difference was amazing. It is fantastic what a group of twelve people can do when they work as a team and one of our leaders told us that we had saved the council paying out about £1000 to get two blokes to do in four days what we had done in four hours. Hoorah for us, hoorah for my aching legs. I am confused as to why it is my legs that ache, as It was my upper body taking the brunt of things as I lifted and carried logs of wet tree. Why my legs? I didn't kick the damn things out of the way! A group of us decided to walk back to our parked cars, using the Wye Valley walk. We actually passed the site of our last volunteer work at the Giant's Cave after about three quarters of an hour. My God - my own contribution hadn't eroded away or collapsed. A minor miracle. I saw a Peregrine Falcon arrow by as we stood outside the cave, too. Awesome.

Thus ended another day with the volunteers. Next month, we meet at a place called Cleddon Bog to do some management of vegetation there. Collective groans came from the veteran volunteers of the group. They had worked there before and, clearly, bog habitat isn't rated as the place to spend your free time. Not without a wet-suit, anyway. I'm guessing it'll be wet and squelchy. The clue's in the name, really.

So there you have it. I came home and immediately washed all my outdoor clothing, which looked as if I had lassooed it all from the back of a charging horse and then galloped through the Florida swamps. Thanks for reading - if you managed to get to the end before pulling a bored face and getting the hell out.

Corriepaw.