Coetir Anian - Cambrian Wildwood

GlobalGiving Report

Cambrian Wildwood

March 2022 to May 2022

Site

More trees were planted during the winter and spring. Using ‘no fence’ tree planting techniques, the trees were planted in locations where they are unlikely to be browsed by the large herbivores. There are a few bits of steep ground where we have planted trees sticking out over the drop. Now we rely on two other methods. One method is planting in existing vegetation that provides protection, such as bramble or thorns. We are establishing new opportunities for this by planting a lot of thorn across the site. The other method is observation of the places where the horses and cattle do not go, due to the rough ground and absence of attractive grazing. These places are concentrated near the boundary with the private forestry property. We also planted trees in a small area fenced off to keep our horses off a bridleway. All the planting is low density around 5m spacing, and higher up it is very low density, more like 20m to 100m spacing. The species planted are hawthorn, blackthorn, scots pine, oak.

The peatland restoration project proceeded in March. Purple moor grass (Molinia caerulea) is not favoured by the herbivores even when it is green. During the winter it is dead and provides no nutrition - the horses do not eat it at all. The thick mat of dead grass prevents other plants from growing. The purple moor grass thrives because of its deep roots and creates big tussocks which make the ground inaccessible. An excavator was used to scrape small areas dominated by purple moor grass on the flatter, wetter ground. Most of these were planted with sphagnum plugs to help the area revert to sphagnum bog. Some scraped areas were not planted, to compare the two treatments.

Felled timber logs have been moved up the hill through the plantation to be stacked at the side of the track. These are transported to the shed for splitting and stacking, to be used as fire wood.

Herbivores

The horses came out of the winter in satisfactory condition and had their annual vet check in April. Two foals were born in April and another in May. The cattle were brought back to the site from the neighbouring property during April once the purple moor grass started to show its new green growth. In May the electric fence was reinstated along the upper track to keep the herbivores on the moorland for the summer. The horses and the cattle appear to be grazing widely over the site.

Education

In March we held the last Winter of Wellbeing days for kids and teenagers, where they learnt traditional skills such as candle making and wood carving and spent time in nature by a camp fire.

The Primary Schools programme started up again, with 3 schools continuing with their first year of activities, learning how to make fire. The groups in the last year were out planting their oak trees.

The Youth Camps are able to get back into full swing this year. We held two in May, with a group of young carers and a group from a deprived part of the local town. This year we are working with two schools and four other local organisations, having found it difficult to get the commitment from most schools, due to their difficulties finding the staff capacity and being under-resourced.

Well-being

Our new ‘Drws Agored’ (Open Door) programmes are dependent on being funded, and this has not yet been secured. Consequently, we have not proceeded with two camps for people in addiction recovery, but hope to go ahead with one later in the year.

We have been able to host groups of asylum seekers, however. The volunteers who assist the asylum seekers in Wolverhampton have been bringing groups along to our Volunteer Work Days. We have therefore made the days more social, with a camp fire, and laid on a variety of tasks of varying physical difficulty. The young men seem to appreciate doing some hard work or walking long distances. One chap from Ethiopia really misses his farm and his cattle, so he was delighted to interact with the Highland cattle on site.

Visits

The project continues to attract increasing attention from academics and from the media. We hosted five university student visits during this period, generally groups of Masters students.

Monitoring habitats

The peatland areas where the purple moor grass was scraped was monitored using fixed point photography and vegetation survey, before and after the scraping.

On the Volunteer Work Day in May we surveyed for birds and flowers to complete species lists.

Other monitoring

Other monitoring work includes counting numbers of visitors to the site using automated counters. And the experiences of people attending project activities.

We carry out qualitative monitoring of our education and wellbeing programmes by collecting feedback from participants.

Don’t forget to look at our website cambrianwildwood.org where you can find out so much about the project and keep up to date with our news items. And contact us if you want to be on our newsletter mailing list.

Links:

• Project website