First job of the day: Brian from Sea Scouts, his daughter Rebecca and I are sent out with two wheelbarrows, three spades and about 60 small tree saplings, to fill up any gaps in St Mary's Corner.
This is the copse that was planted up by the girls from St Mary's School in Wantage (now, alas, relocated elsewhere in the country) a couple of years ago. It's a small corner of the field adjoining the canal, which the farmer kindly allowed us to plant up with trees.
We put in about 150 trees at that time, and of course a lot of them did not survive, so from time to time we go back and put in some more, to bulk it up.
Today we have another mixed batch of mostly deciduous trees to add: ash, hazel, oak, horse chestnut, all lovingly raised in small pots in Roy's back garden. It's all a bit different from how I do this professionally: I normally dig a good sized hole, fluff up the bottom, handful of bonemeal, mix in a bucket of organic matter with the soil, carefully position the tree, insert stake, backfill, firm gently, tie to stake, water in well etc etc.
At these sessions, it's more a case of push spade into dirt, make slit, ram sapling into slit, stomp down firmly, move on to the next one.... quantity over quality, I guess!
Mind you, these saplings have to be tough to survive, alone, unwatered and unweeded, so they may as well get used to the treatment.
Today the three of us are also contending with driving sleet: the cold north wind is howling across the fields of West Challow, and we're working as fast as we can!
Here's Rebecca planting the last but one tree, with Brian catching his breath.
I took the chance to check on some of the earlier plantings, and a good number of them are surviving, and are just breaking into bud, which is very encouraging. You can see by the quantity of nettles growing here, that the land is actually quite good: it's rather more soil and rather less claggy clay than we find in some other parts.
Final tree of the day - a sweet little Scots Pine.
We choose to plant this one near the canal edge of the copse, in the hopes that it will be clearly visible from the towpath, once it gets established.
We planted a couple more of these pines further along, by the Challow Graveyard, a couple of years ago, and they're doing really well, so I hope that this one will, too. Brave little sapling, isn't it?
Having planted all the trees, we collect up the empty pots (for Roy to fill with more trees in due course) load up the one remaining wheelbarrow (Mike had been along earlier to pinch one of them) and stagger off along the towpath, numb in ears and hands, to see what the others are up to.
Aha! While we've been freezing to depth, they've been keeping themselves nice and warm, barrowing another heap of hardcore along the revetment.
We leap to join in, here's Brian helping Jim to fill our barrow, and quickly discover that it's actually quite a lot warmer down in the shelter of the cut, than it was out on the field borders.
There's not that much more barrowing to be done, as it's a surprisingly large work party turnout today, considering that it's Easter weekend.
This is where the hardcore is going: we're continuing to work our way along the soon-to-be-permissive path, building up the canal-side edge to make it level and easy to walk on.
To make the revetment, we first drive in a row of stakes - in this case, stout straightish willow branches, sharpened to a point - then put some old fencing planks alongside them, then pack in as much hardcore as we can lay hands on.
Eventually we'll be dredging, and some of that material will probably be used for the top layer. I'd quite like to get a petrol powered chipper, as we have plenty of branches to chip up, and it makes a really good all-weather surface, but unfortunately they cost £800 or so to buy, plus someone would have to store it, and transport it. Shame... but there you go, we're only volunteers, and we don't have the resources to do all the things we'd like to.
Having run out of hardcore to shift, Roy tells us to get started on the bonfire. Ray and Gary from Swindon have come to join us for the day, and Ray gets the honour of starting the fire, while Brian, Rebecca, Malcy, Dmitri and John Minns watch him.
This is, of course, a Canal Club tradition, that a minimum of 6 persons have to watch while any one person does any one task.....
After a few false starts, the fire gets a good hold, and we all crowd round it in gratitude.
At Roy's suggestion, we're burning everything: not just the wood and the ivy, but any junk, plastic, wire, bottles, anything and everything.There is a reason for this: glass gets the edges rounded off in the heat, making it safer to handle, and general rubbish gets reduced in volume by the heat: anything that can melt, does so, and the remaining metal can often be snapped or folded into smaller sizes, making our eventual job of shifting out all the non-organic rubbish much easier.
Lunchtime!
As it's Easter, we're having an Easter Bonnet competition, courtesy of James and Jill, who thought of it.
The idea is to decorate our hard hats (a cunning ploy to make us all wear them, he! he!) with a choice of themes between traditional Easter, and general foliage.
Roy has chosen to blend easter chicks with a snowman, having read the weather forecast for the day..... and he's not wrong, just look at the amount of hail that has collected in the seat of the Malcy's chair!
Here is the lunchtime lineup: from the left, Roy, strange person with yellow ears, James at the back with helicopter blades, Jill with tin foil and smarties, and their nephew Andrew, carrying off a "duck" theme.
I got a special commendation for marking up my face with whiskers... I started off with a black nose as well, but it didn't fare too well, what with the cold wind making my nose run! Still, it gave my neighbours a bit of a laugh when I left the house in the morning...
Did I mention the weather?? After lunch we were treated to waves of hail and sleet, interspersed with brilliant sunshine.
Here's my chair after one of the sudden hail storms.
Apparently, in Wantage it snowed properly a few times, big fluffy flakes, but all we got was driving sleet or hard hail, and generally at a 45 degree angle. A good day for having a big bonfire!
Ostensibly, Jim was lining these old willow logs up near to the fire to dry them out, ready for being burnt, but we thought he was building a modern art "piece", and should probably apply to the Tate for a grant.
Possibly of ritual significance, would you say?
Any fungus experts around?
This old log was completely covered in layer upon layer of bracket fungus, all beautifully carried out in shades of brown and green, delicately patterned and neatly arranged.
Luckily Vic hadn't arrived at this point, otherwise he probably would have tried to cook them and a quick internet search indicates that it's very unwise to eat any type of fungus unless you can identify it positively....
At this point there was a slight digression; Malcy, growing tired of tripping over a piece of metal which was sticking up out of the ground, decided to try to dig it out. Swindon Ray was brought in, with his bodging bar, to help lever at it.
After several minutes of huffing and puffing, it started to move: this caused much excitement amongst the watching crowd. Well, me, at any rate.
Finally it came loose, breaking up into smaller pieces as it did so.
It turned out, we think, to be an old iron fireplace. Not that exciting, after all, but Malcy was pleased as he wouldn't keep tripping over it any more....
Meanwhile, further down the Cut towards the Silver Lane bridge, what had James found?
Another bike!
We didn't think he'd be winning any races on this one though... that back tyre is completely flat.
Doug, meanwhile, was keeping an eye on the bonfire, or possibly just keeping warm.
Did I mention that it kept sleeting and hailing on us?
Oh blimey, Malcy's found something else to dig up!
Actually, this time it was me who kept tripping over it, so I asked him to have a go at getting rid of it.
It seemed to be something like a metal box, possibly a water tank?
Having cleared around the edges, Malcy starts to excavate the stuff within, to make it easier to lift it out.
There were roof tiles, bricks, all sorts of rubble, both in it and around it.
The rubble came in handy, we barrowed it straight back to the towpath and added it to the revetment work. (Mike, by the way, was still banging in those willow stakes, unstoppably!) It was starting to look like a cold water tank...
But no, it turned out to be a metal bucket, and it clearly used to swing or tilt, as it had two strengthened pivot points, one on each side.
It looks for all the world like something you'd find in a mine, but I can't think of any mining that would take place on the flat Oxfordshire plain....
A few people suggested that it might be from a tipping handcart. I'm not so sure, so if anyone has any suggestions, do feel free to e-mail me.
Aha! A late arrival for the Easter Bonnet competition, here's Bob, sporting a very jaunty Spring effort.
Continuing the theme of "dodgy weather", it features spring daffs at the front, and snow-covered holly at the back, with interesting drop-egg ear-muffs.
The fire was starting to burn down somewhat, so here is Swindon Ray on the left, huffing on it, with Gary on the right, observing. Jill, in the background, is still retrieving bricks and hardcore from Malcy's second excavation of the day.
"Roight!" says Roy, "Let's get that stump out, then."
People are sent off to get the Turfor, and the stump starts inching it's way out of the ground.
At the other end of the hawser (almost invisible, sorry folks, I have to shrink these photos in the interest of not running out of server space, and sometimes the fine detail gets a bit lost) is James and the Turfor, attached to a sturdy tree.
Heave away, James!
Towards the end of the day (for me, at any rate) I spotted Malcy toasting his gloves, to dry them out.
He said that it was working, but that he needed another pair of gloves to wear to protect his hands while toasting the first pair.. there's no pleasing some people!
And finally, the tree stump was rolled on top of the glove-toasting bonfire, which was by now so hot that it would have burnt practically anything.
And Roy was right about the reduction of rubbish: as you can see, the pile is mostly wood and ash, yet we threw tremendous amounts of "junk" onto it.
Once it's cold, we can sift through the ashes and put aside the unburnable stuff for safe removal at a later date.
Well, that was enough for me, it was mid afternoon and time to go home and get warm again.