Well, after all those sunny late autumn days – it seemed to go on all through October and November, and even in Mid-December it was still as much as 15 C, extraordinarily warm – it is time to get back to talking about conservation work.

Volunteers, a corporate group, and trainees took turns to coppice and dig out the mud in the “Mangrove Swamp” (Willow carr). The newly-qualified chainsaw specialists managed to lay two willows, carefully avoiding felling them completely, to add to the artful tangle of almost-mangrove trunks over the newly-deepened water, thus giving a surprisingly “natural” look after a great deal of work.

We then dragged the cut willow to the edge of the new Birch nursery area. Several Birches have already fallen (you can see a large trunk in the photo), and many others are on their last legs, covered in ivy and only waiting for a winter storm to bring them down. So we have cleared a sizeable patch of bramble to allow seedlings to grow, and protected the area with a woven deadhedge: two lines of sharpened willow stakes (front and back of the hedge), woven with snibbed willow wands, and packed with willow twigs in between. We’ve planted a few saplings we found around the site – an oak, a birch, two hazel – and we hope they’ll be joined by many small birches in due course.