Typical! The weekend’s here; but is there any snow? No Sirreeee! It’s all gone. Last week I had just one hour of daylight each day to study the gait patterns in the snow. Now there was nothing left. I looked at Billy the Bichon. Well, there was nothing for it except to go on a mini expedition.
Now, we quite often go on mini expeditions. In fact it’s quite a big expedition for a little dog. We get our lunch and plenty of water and we saddle up and hit the fields that surround the house. Today’s expedition had a simple objective. To plot out the local woods to see exactly where it extended in the 1800s. Simple.
We set out at 10 o’clock. The wind was a chill north westerly, but it wasn’t the freezing easterly of last week. In fact the temperature was just on zero degrees C.
Before we attempted the woodland task, we circumnavigated the fields to have a look for any tracks and signs.
We skirted the edge of the fields for a couple of hours, spotting fallow, fox and muntjac tracks and of course rabbit and hare.
We had lunch in the lee of on old oak, which was a welcome rest.
I had bacon and egg in an edible plate.
Bill had… bacon and egg in an edible plate. The mini trangia came into it’s own again.
For a change, I took just a canvas shoulder bag. My mate Maverick gave this to me in October. I think it’s a Highlander bag and cost no more than a fiver. Great value.
You can see that I’ve put a smaller bag inside just to organise the contents a little better.
We followed the edge of the field for quite a while until we came to the actual edge of the local wood. You are probably wondering how we’re going to find the edge of a wood that existed over 180 years ago. Well, enter 21st century technology.
The iphone has a great piece of software which I’m sure many of you know called Memory Map ordnance survey software mapping. As well as your local area in 1:25000, you can also purchase older maps; in this case an ordnance survey 1825 map. It’s now a simple case of overlaying the old map onto the position given by the GPS.
So here we see my position at the edge of the wood “in 1825” according to the GPS…
…and standing in the same spot and looking back east “into” the wood. In this photo, you can see that the start of the west side of the wood is about a quarter of a mile away. Fascinating stuff.
I plotted out the rest of the wood, surprised to see how large it had been. I’m now going to plot this information onto an ordnance survey map proper so that people can see the extent of the old woodland.
So why am I doing this? My ultimate aim will be to plant trees to extend the wood to it’s original size or at least plant them in an area the same size in the vicinity. Of course, the idea is inspired by hen and her wonderful 6000 tree-planting project in Exmoor.
Don’t laugh now. Who’s interested in this mad idea and who’s going to back it? Well, the local conservation group are already working to get the wood LNR (Local Nature Reserve) status and they are working to secure funding for tree-planting from the MOD landowners; so my woodland extension idea might just be viable.
Meanwhile, I could tell that Billy was getting a little tired. We had been out for nearly five hours and it was time to get home. The inside of Doris the Discovery was a welcome sight and we drove home tired but happy.
Thanks for the visit
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