The plot thickens
Or, to put it another way, if you turn your back for five minutes on blackthorn it will put out suckers to start a new tree or simply just keep growing even when it’s been cut down. It makes hawthorn look soft by comparison and will happily go through anything less than protective site boots.
The pictures give no idea of just how dense the site is. Previous surveys of the area had marked the area as ‘impenetrable’ and we had to sign a disclaimer regarding our own safety before being allowed to lay foot on the site.
What we have purchased is a small patch of land that has literally been untouched since the day it was fenced in when the local highways department built a new by-pass and just happily surrounded everything around the new road layout in fencing and hedges. But let’s not get an image of some wonderful untouched wilderness – from day one a thousand blackthorns set upon the site and, together with old hedging, began a never-ending fight for light leaving a canopy about 10m high with no light or life below. This dark subterranean world has no day light and is only occasionally punctuated by barbed wire and litter that people happily throw out of car windows.
Our initial access to the site is to climb over a high fence at the one point where the trees and blackthorns aren’t pushing up against the restraining boundary. Coming down the other side and there is nowhere to go – we are literally hemmed in by plant life. Time to get cutting!
With an initial plan to make a path from one end of the site to the other to begin to see what we’d got, the first week was been spent hacking and cutting our way through a combination of blackthorn and hawthorn with secateurs and handsaw until, with a real sense of achievement, we have created a corridor from one end to the other.
