Rain doesn't stop play!

We’re in the busiest time of year for us at the volunteer centre at the moment. I think it’s all the good weather that makes everyone want to stay here around now ….

CDOT members relieved to have got that boulder out!

We’ve been back on our main project of the year, working on the lakeshore path at Wray Bay. Community Drugs Outreach Trust, fresh from their first day with us pulling Himalayan Balsam (mentioned last month), helped us for a typically wet and muddy day. It might have been less than perfect weather but such was their enthusiasm that the hardest part of the day was getting the group to stop at packing up time!



After this we had the second visit from the Rochdale Dukes, a self named group of young people from Rochdale doing their gold Duke of Edinburgh award. Brought by volunteer leader Fida Hussain, they were the first of this year’s groups who worked on the path last year so were thrilled to see how well their previous work had settled in. Luckily, we’ve taken delivery of a consignement of brand new waterproofs so when the rain arrived on their first day of removing spruce regeneration on an SSSI they were kept dry. Mostly. 



Rochdale Dukes give the new waterproofs a postive review!

On the theme of keeping dry, we had a particularly busy week with a National Trust working holiday and our woodland ranger building a new woodshed. Using green woodworking techniques they’ve built us a fantastic frame. The rain forcing most of the work to be done inside didn’t do much for our floor and there’s plenty more work to be done but this is a great start to ensuring our future volunteer groups have a nice dry supply of wood. You can visit the Basecamp Facebook page for more on this woodshed project.



The Basecamp in full workshop mode - we did manage to clean the carpets!

At the moment Basecamp is stuffed to the gunnels (in a true sense, not an Olympic stadium sense) with one of our biggest groups: West Runton Scripture Union. They’ve been coming to Basecamp since 1969 so are a great link to the past for us and always stay for two weeks with a gang of up to 30 volunteers. With more rain forecast tomorrow our drying room is going to be working hard!


Posted by Rob, Basecamp Community Ranger