Wychwood Leaves

Dry Stone Walling

2011-06-29T09:07:00.000-07:00

The Wychwood Project does a dry stone walling project every summer. This summer we are restoring a wall beside the footpath that leads from Burford to Swinbrook. We are going to be working on 90 ft or so of wall between St. Oswald’s Church, Widford, and the River Windrush. Trevor Townsend will be supervising the walling group on Mondays and Tuesdays for the next few months.

We have spent the last couple of days preparing the wall. It is about 6 ft high at its highest point and about 4 ft at its lowest point where a big stone stile goes through it. It had collapsed entirely in places or bowed out where the inside of the wall had crumbled. The first day it was blazing hot, even by 9.30 when we arrived at the wall, so we all put our sun hats on and set to. We started by clearing the nettles and thistles from either side of the wall. We then began to take down the wall stone by stone, laying the large stones in rows either side of the wall and throwing the smaller stones into piles to be used as rubble for the infill in the middle of the wall. The second day it was much cooler. We took down more of the wall, so that by the end of the day we had about 30 ft of wall almost ready for restoration, about half of it still intact and the rest taken down to its foundation stones.

We have already come across all sorts of wild life: we found a couple of common lizards in the wall and carefully moved them further up into the part of the wall we’re not working on. The common lizard is one of three species of lizard to be found in

Britain

, the others being the endangered sand lizard and the slow worm. Interestingly the common lizard and the slow worm are viviparous, that is, they give birth to live young, whilst the sand lizard is oviparous, that is, it lays its eggs, in this case in a sandy burrow to be incubated by the warmth of the ground. We found a short-tailed vole amongst the stones at the bottom of the wall and a common toad. Beneath the stile Trevor found two nests of ants, one red, the other black, and two shrews, presumably breeding, which quickly made themselves scarce.

The wall is in the beautiful Windrush valley right next to a field full of humps and bumps. These are the outlines of a mediaeval village which no longer survives. It probably disappeared in the 14^th Century as a result of the Black Death. All that remains of the village are a mill, a few houses, a manor house, built in the 16^th Century and St. Oswald’s Church, built in the 13^th Century on the site of a Roman villa. Roman mosaic tiles can still be seen in the chancel and early 14^th Century wall paintings survive. One of the wall paintings is a depiction of the cautionary tale of the three living and the three dead: ‘As you are, so we: and as we are, so you will be, wealth honour and power are of no value at the hour of your death.’ This is one of the earliest depictions of the subject in the country.

Join the group or try a taster session.

Experienced wallers are very welcome to join the group, as and when you are available, but please let Jane Bowley know before you go along for the first time. If you have never tried walling before and would like to have a go we will be offering taster days on Mondays with a maximum of four new people each day. Donations are very welcome. For more information about this project please contact Jane Bowley on 01865 815422 or email jane.bowley@oxfordshire.gov.uk

A day in the life of a Wychwood Project volunteer.

2011-05-23T11:01:00.000-07:00

Daniel here. I thought I'd publish an extract from my journal (part 1 and part 2) to give you an idea of the sort of thing the Wychwood Project is involved in and what volunteers get up to. Here it is:

Tuesday 10^th May

Today we worked at Eynsham Fish ponds, a beautiful and peaceful place to go and walk or have a picnic. These fish ponds were built in c. 1360 in the grounds of Eynsham Abbey to provide fish for the inhabitants and guests of the abbey. The Chil brook, which runs beside the ponds, was diverted to the south to make room for them. Remains of the ponds, and of the ditches which carried water to and from them, can still be seen. See this link for an archaeological reconstruction of the ponds and abbey.

Over the past few years Verity Hughes has been running a regeneration project on behalf of West Oxfordshire District Council to clear the ponds and the area around them of undergrowth and reeds, to build paths and bridges, put up ‘cairns’ with plaques on them explaining the history and topography of the abbey ponds and to carry out archaeological digs. The Wychwood Project and other local volunteer groups have been helping with this work.

The Tuesday Team today comprised of Jane Bowley, Carol Foster, Abigail Rumsey, Matthew, me and Verity Hughes who came to work with us and supervise us. We started by clearing away elm saplings next to the car park which were obstructing the sight line of the car park entrance. With so many of us working on it, we didn’t take long. After a quick break and some scones kindly provided by a friend of Jane’s, we went down to the Chil brook (which runs alongside the foot-path that leads from the right hand side of the car-park as you face the wood). Our job here was to clear a way through a mass of brambles, stinging nettles and overgrown willow down a steep bank to the brook, where children come and play. We made short work of this, too, and it was very satisfying to see the bank clear. We then had lunch at one of the picnic benches next to the car park, before a few of us went home. Abigail and I stayed to widen one of the paths. We had a good, fun destructive time of it - at least I did -, slashing at cow parsley and stinging nettles with our slashing tools. After we’d finished we found a beautiful large moth on Abigail’s jumper. We later identified it as a Lime Hawk-moth, which flies from May till July. See this link for more information.

Brown Hare Survey

2011-05-09T05:21:00.000-07:00

On Sunday 8th May I (Daniel) got up at 6 in the morning for a brown hare survey on a mixed arable 350 acre farm near Hailey, which has taken place here annually in the Spring for the last 3 years or so. We had about 30 volunteers come to help count. We were split into eight groups, each group taking a field or two, walking round it and recording on a detailed map of the field precisely where, at what time and in what direction they saw any hare, the aim of which was to make sure that any seen weren’t counted twice. The group I was with saw six in two fields. And a total of 27 were seen in the whole 350 acre farm.

This compares with 51 counted on 18^th April 2010, 28 counted on 27^th April 2008 and 39 counted on 20^th May 2007. The aim of these surveys, apart from getting volunteers out on a lovely Spring morning, is to provide a small sample in Oxfordshire of the brown hare population each year, to contribute to an idea being gained of population change.

Wychwood v's new blog

2011-04-12T05:10:00.000-07:00

My name is Daniel. I graduated from Durham University in June 2010 and have for the last few weeks been volunteering for the Wychwood Project twice a week.
In this blog I, and other volunteers for the project, will write about the things that we are doing and any bits of information that we think will interest you.

I also thought I’d start keeping a journal (part 1 and part 2) on the Wychwood Project website to let you know what it’s like to be a volunteer here. I hope you enjoy it.