News Archive 2024 Apr-Jun
A morning of path repair (one way or another) was in store for the eight-person working party that turned out at the Hartley West Farm road out at nine o’clock today. The main project was installing a drainage pipe in the meadow, but there were a couple of side jobs first.
The short, sloping boardwalk at the side waterfall had a broken tread-board, so we replaced that with a new piece, screwed in place.
Photograph A. Repairing boardwalk
We also refurbished the stile that leads into the meadow from the farm road just after crossing the stone bridge: a new step was added, to make it easier to navigate, and some aggregate was placed on that and other surfaces.
Photograph B. Refurbished stile
The aforementioned drainage pipe was a follow-on from the anti-flooding session of the 20th of February. The pipe we dug in was of black corrugated plastic design with slit-holes at intervals to let water in. A trench was dug from the low-lying area in the meadow, where the water was ponding earlier in the winter, to the river.
A spirit level had to be used to ensure that the pipe sloped gradually downwards. Some pea gravel was put in around the pipe to allow water to percolate into the pipe via the slits. This had to be augmented with river pebbles when we ran out of gravel. Finally, the trench was topped up with soil and the path was dressed with gravel where the pipe ran underneath.
Photograph C. Digging out trench
Photograph D. Laying pipe
Photograph E. Fishing for pebbles
Wildlife. There were quite a few bird calls today, including some quirky ones. The rooks were calling from the treetops above the meadow, and one of them seemed to be imitating first a mallard then a herring gull! A song thrush was singing nearby, also a chiffchaff and a blackcap.
This was a wintry day – with some brightness but a chilly wind and a shower at around quarter past nine – so we were all happy enough to return to our homes around 12:30.
Incidentally, our musical evening on Saturday – a performance by the Backworth Male Voice Choir at St Pauls Church, Seaton Sluice plus poetry, a video and a talk on our Working Party’s activities – went off very well, attracting a large audience and bringing in a tidy sum to help with our finances.
A working party of eight volunteers converged on the Hartley Lane carpark this morning to do some willow-weaving near the seat between the carpark and the estuary, on an unusually fine, bright, breezy day.
Before starting work on the willows, four of us did a bit of path repair work. There is a spot on the carpark-to-estuary path that has been flooded during this rainy period. Today it had partly dried up but was still more-or-less a quagmire.
Photograph A. Path being repaired
To fix the problem we cut a drainage slot in the edging board, then scraped the mud off the surface with spades to reveal the old aggregate path underneath, and finally dressed the surface with aggregate from one of our nearby piles. That having been accomplished, so we joined the others at the willows.
Photograph B. Path after repair
These are located on the other side of the footpath from the bench that is upstream of the footbridge at the head of the estuary. This line of willows was planted to block off a place where dogs were in the habit of rushing into the burn. Of course, we’ve got nothing against dogs, but they were eroding the bank and causing soil to get into the river and silt it up – and anyway, the water in the burn isn’t entirely pollution-free.
Well, these willows need a bit of maintenance every year to restore the integrity of the barrier and to stop the willows getting too tall. You would be amazed how much they grow in a year. The following photograph gives a rough idea.
Photograph C. Overgrown willows
The technique is to cut each willow stem, preferably close to the ground, with an axe or billhook, then bend it down (without breaking it) to a horizontal position, then tie it to other stems to keep it in place. Other stems were shortened with a pair of loppers and the resulting cut stems were pushed into the ground to hopefully take root and add to the barrier.
Photograph D. Weaving willows
Here is a photo of the completed work.
Photograph E. End result
There was a lot of birdsong today and we heard wrens, robins, a chiffchaff, a chaffinch, a great tit, a coal tit and a goldfinch. We also heard the calls of herons, crows, jackdaws, and a pheasant.
Friends of Holywell Dene Charity Concert featuring Backworth Male Voice Choir
On Saturday 20th April the Friends of Holywell Dene held a fundraising concert at St. Paul’s Church Seaton Sluice, featuring the Backworth Male Voice Choir. The concert was a sell out, with tickets being eagerly snapped up well in advance of the event.
The Chair, Chris Wood, welcomed the capacity audience and introduced the 30+ strong choir. The programme for the evening was a combination of poetry and song, intermixed with a video walk through the Dene, and a powerpoint display showing the latest working party activities. A selection of FoHD’s awards were on display in the Church for visitors’ perusal.
The choirs performance was split into two halves, featuring music as diverse as the traditional ‘Bobby Shafto’, ‘ Anthem’ from Chess, ‘Dock of the Bay’ by Otis Redding and Queen’s epic ‘Bohemian Rapsody’. The choir also featured a novel rendition of ‘Greenland Whale Fisheries’ sung by Steve Dodds dressed in period clothing.
Two poems were featured during the concert, ‘Seaton Sluice and Holywell Dene’ by choir member Andy Rutherford, and ‘The Seaton Burn’ written by late FoHD member Hylton Weir.
The two halves of the performance were separated by an interval for refreshments (served in record time), and the drawing of the raffle, the first prize being a beautiful oil painting of Holywell Dene by Alison Christer.
On conclusion of the choir’s superb performance, their Musical Director Andrew Clarence remarked that new singers were always welcome to join the choir if any male members of the audience would like to give it a try.
Chris Wood then thanked all those who had helped make the evening run smoothly, and also thanked the audience for their enthusiastic support and generosity.
The Friends of Holywell Dene would like to give grateful thanks to the members of the Backworth Male Voice Choir, without whom this event would not have been possible.
River clearance was the main task for the nine-volunteer working-party this morning, which witnessed three unusual meteorological phenomena: sunshine, warmth and absence of rain!
The first job, however, was freeing the cow gate of river litter. This is the gate on the downstream side of the stone bridge over which the Hartley West Farm access road passes. This is designed to stop stock from getting out of the field and into the Dene by passing under the bridge. Every winter, this gate gets congested with branches, large and small, that have floated downstream and got stuck against it. This raises the gate and allows cattle to get underneath.
So, on with the waders (three of us) and into the stream we went. The branches were removed and the gate restored to its correct position, with the assistance of other volunteers carrying the removed timber to high ground.
Photograph A. Freeing cow gate
While this was going on several of us worked on the basket-work barrier in the hedgerow on the right-hand side of the road descending to the stone bridge. This was in need of repair, so we wove some wands cut from the hazels in the meadow area onto the stakes already in place to reinforce the barrier.
All volunteers now came together for the main business of the morning: logjam clearance. For this we had four wheelbarrow loads of tools, including a hand-winch and cables. The first logjam to be addressed was the one that forms every winter under the riverside tree near the dipping pond. A lot of branches and twigs had accumulated there, along with the usual floating litter (tennis balls, plastic packets and bottles, etc). We hauled all the branches out and bagged the litter for removal.
Photograph B. Decluttering logjam
The next logjam was in the river upstream of the stone bridge and about halfway along the meadow area. Our three volunteers that had donned waders cleared as much of this as they could by hand but it became evident that there were several large waterlogged branches in the tangle, so the winch came into play. This was anchored to a post hammered into the ground at one end and to one of the branches at the other. Then some “elbow grease” was applied to the winch handle was to bring the branch slowly out of the water.
Again, the “landward” volunteers carried the river timber (which, being waterlogged, was heavy) to dry ground away from the river.
Photograph C. Second logjam
Another two lesser logjams were dealt with in similar fashion, at which point we gathered up our tools and took them back to the van before returning to our homes.
There was some wildlife interest today:
several peacock butterflies were seen
a robin, a wren, and a chiffchaff were heard
the rooks were making their usual racket in the tall trees above the meadow
swallows have been spotted in the area recently, by the way – despite the wintry weather
The wildlife seems to be just getting on with life despite the generally cold and wet weather.
A muster of seven working party members turned out at Wallridge Drive, Holywell, for another river clearance session this morning, on a day that felt unusually warm, and without either rain or wind!
The problem we were addressing is illustrated by the following photo.
Photograph A. Logjam
Some people think unblocking the river is a bad idea on grounds of flood control and biodiversity. Well, please note the following in the photo above: (1) litter, (2) scum. The sheer unsightliness of these logjams is one of the reasons that we get complaints from some residents if we don’t keep the Seaton Burn flowing freely.
What do you think? If there’s a better way to manage river blockages, we would genuinely like to know. Incidentally, there are no settlements downstream of where we were working that are in danger of flooding.
Anyway, the first step was for three of us to get into waders and then get into the river (which is deep at that point). It was then that one of us (your correspondent) realised that one of his waders had a puncture, so out he got!
Next the two remaining “amphibious volunteers” go to work disentangling the logjam and passing the branches and twigs (all of them waterlogged and heavy) out to the volunteers on the bank who piled them well away from the river.
Photograph B. Removing branches
Some branches needed to be cut up, but we are not allowed to use chainsaws at present, because of accidents by other groups in the Northumberland County Council’s bailiwick, so we deployed our chainsaw substitute – see below. “Good exercise but very time-consuming” was the verdict, I think it’s fair to say.
Photograph C. Two-man saw in use
Next the trusty hand-winch was brought into action to pull some of the larger logs out of the water. A problem we always have when doing this is that logs tend to get jammed against the river bank. When this happens we often rig up a snatch block (pulley) to direct the force of the winch cable upwards.
Today there was no suitable overhanging branch to hang the snatch block from, so we used our latest innovation: a tripod. The idea is to place this three-legged timber frame on the river bank and hang the snatch block from its apex, so as to be able to raise the winch cable to a higher angle. This worked very well, but probably needs adapting a bit to stop the back leg from embedding itself in the soft earth.
In fact two winches were now in use – one to pull the log and the other to lift it over the rim of the river bank.
All was going well until towards the end of proceedings we pulled on one of the remaining logs and it turned out to be attached to a huge root-ball. This was probably the riverside tree that by falling into the water caused the logjam in the first place. Well, this was too big to pull out of the river, so we had to rig one of the winches to pull it to one side and against another fallen tree to get it out of the way of the flow of the river.
All that was left to do now was to clear up and gather up the tools. We managed to get most of the plastic and other man-made litter out of the river and this filled a black bag. So, off home we went.
Photograph D. Pile of wood removed from river
Not much wildlife to report this week, but the usual-suspect small birds were singing away, a pheasant was calling from the undergrowth, many wildflowers were in bloom and most of the trees are now in full leaf.
Don’t forget that we have a Facebook page, where local people share their brilliant photos of the Dene and chat about it. Just put “Friends of Holywell Dene Facebook” into a search engine.
Only six volunteers were available for work in the Dene this morning, but they got through quite a lot of it. The venue was the lane outside the gas pumping station near Concorde House, Holywell (or Seaton Delaval). The work consisted of three tasks as follows.
First, two of us went to Dale Top with a strimmer and strimmed the vegetation around the dene-top bench. One volunteer was strimming and the other clearing up the cuttings with a rake.
Meanwhile the other four were working on the second task, namely sorting out the tree trunk with roots attached that we had parked temporarily at the end of last week’s logjam-clearance session. Part of it was hauled out of the river with the hand winch, but the other part, the root-ball, was just pulled into a suitable place at the side of the river.
We used the tripod for a second time for this, and it proved very useful for suspending the snatch block (pulley) at a suitable height for pulling objects up the river bank.
Photograph A. Tripod and winch in use
Photograph B. Root ball being winched
After this, we all joined up to do some sycamore-bashing on the north side of the river between Concorde House and the pumping station. Sycamores are very common here, and are a somewhat invasive tree from abroad. So, we seek out saplings and pull them up or cut them off at the base.
We also trim the lower branches and twigs off existing mature sycamores. Small trees are cut down with a bowsaw. This part of the woods is still highly populated with sycamores, but we feel we have got them under control and in due proportion to other tree species.
At around 11:30, a bit of drizzle set in and soon it was properly raining. We thought we had been quite lucky because the weather forecast had been more pessimistic. So, we decided to call it a day at this point, having achieved quite a lot with a small squad.
The working party session this morning was the first full strimming session of the summer. Eight volunteers turned out at the Melton Constable end of the estuary on a dull, cool day – ideal conditions for doing this kind of work.
Four strimmers were in use, one large and the other three small. These were fresh from their annual service. However, the fuel which we had held over from last year had deteriorated in storage, and two of the strimmers were stuttering a bit; one so badly that it had to be changed for the spare.
The trimmers we use are, strictly-speaking, brush-cutters – heavy-duty and with a metal blade as the cutting head (see photo). A carrying harness is worn by the operator along with protective helmet, visor and ear mufflers. Each person strimming is accompanied by a person with a rake or pitchfork to clear up the cuttings.
Photograph A. Brush-cutter
Anyway, after assembling near Dene Cottage and having a bit of a chat followed by a safety talk, we proceeded up the west-side path along the Seaton Burn, bearing strimmers and rakes – also loppers, bowsaws and the hedge trimmer to sort out the overhead branches.
Photograph B. Strimming
After three hours, we had strimmed the verges of the path right along the path to the bench near the footbridge at the head of the estuary. At that point, we packed it in for the day. It always takes about half an hour to trek back to the van and put the tools away.
We will probably be doing this most sessions throughout the summer, and the simple reason for that is that the paths in Holywell Dene would probably be impassable otherwise. The grasses and weeds grow rapidly in the middle months of the year and, except where there is dense shade, get to above head height by July. They then tend to flop down onto the paths after rain.
If you encounter us on a Tuesday morning please take care and keep your dog on a lead while passing us. We are easy to spot! – we put warning signs on the path at either end of our working space and the strimmers betray their presence with their noise.
A working party of nine continued with the 2024 strimming effort this morning, starting at Hartley Lane carpark. That meant four strimmers in action with four rakers in attendance, and one volunteer on the hedge trimmer.
We started at the carpark and strimmed our way down the path towards the estuary, stopping at the seat in the dip in the middle of that path. Then it was back to the carpark and off towards the stone bridge, strimming the paths around and about the dipping pond on the way.
Next we crossed over to the meadow upstream of the bridge and did the meadow path. And that was it for the day.
Photograph A. Strimming
Meanwhile the shrubs alongside the paths and the overhead branches were being cut back with the hedge trimmer.
We were running out of strimmer fuel towards the end. Never fear however, because Northumberland County Council have arranged for us to have 40 litres of suitable fuel – so operations can continue next week.
As usual, we picked up the litter as we came across it. Quite a few people passed us on the paths, and we guided them safely round the strimmers, asking dog-owners to put their dogs on the lead for that short time.
We noticed some damage to a fence, which we know has been done by motor-bikers (see photo). The police have been informed.
Photograph B. Damaged fence
Not much else to say really – another boring day at the office. But actually, Holywell Dene is quite a nice office to work in!
Incidentally, the pond is looking good, what with the vivid yellow flag irises and the reeds. We are hoping the Council will replace the old pond-dipping platform soon.
Photograph C. Dipping pond
There was a bit of wildlife interest:
An oystercatcher flew overhead, calling, and there was a couple of herons nearby.
In song were blackbirds, a blackcap, a whitethroat, robins, a wren, chaffinches and a chiffchaff.
The rooks were calling from the tall trees across the burn from the meadow.
An orange-tip butterfly was fluttering about.
And of course many flowers are out at this time of year.
The weather was dullish and cool, and the rain only started when we got back home, which is very convenient!
A decent-sized working party of nine volunteers met up at the Crowhall Farm cattle grid this morning for a bit of strimming in the hot sun.
After getting kitted up with strimmers, rakes, loppers, warning triangles, petrol cans etc, we ventured across the cow field (passing the very placid bull!) to the style, then along the path to the left to the upstream footbridge.
When we got there, we noticed that the vegetation was now very tall; also the trees planted in the meadow on the south side below the footbridge needed some of the lower branches removed to achieve a more tree-like shape.
One of us was tasked with pruning the trees and the other eight set off with their strimmers and rakes to get the pathside vegetation under control.
Photograph A. Strimming
Photograph B. Raking
Photograph C. Pruned oak tree
It was a hot, sweaty day, so we had a couple of breaks to take on water, tea, coffee (according to taste) or iced lollies (proffered by our kindly chairperson).
We had made it our objective to get as far as the bench between the high-level bridge on the south side and the lower footbridge. Having attained that objective, we upped sticks and departed, leaving Holywell Dene a more navigable space than before.
Wildlife interest:
one of us spotted a dipper (black river bird with white throat) by the upper footbridge
a blackcap and a whitethroat (little warblers) were heard
meadow brown butterflies are around
lots of flowers are out – too many to mention
Despite the wet weather, we managed to assemble a working party of ten volunteers this morning to continue the summer 2024 strimming effort.
The starting point was the metal gate on the Hartley West Farm access road. After unloading the five strimmers and other tools from the van, we set off in the direction of the lower wooden footbridge.
We started strimming the verges around the vicinity of the old “new mill” (i.e. downstream of the stepping stones), and it was strimming all the way after that – up the north side of the Dene to the footbridge, then over the bridge and back along the south side via the side waterfall.
As usual, we were raking up the strimmings, trimming the overhanging trees and picking up items of litter. The paths were muddy in places, after last night’s rain, and the weather got steadily more showery as the time went on.
Photograph A. The strimming team at work
The great advantage of rainy weather is that there are fewer walkers in the Dene, so we were able to crack on with the work. The result was that by the time we got to the stone bridge, we had accomplished all we had set out to do, and so (with the showers getting worse) we packed up and went home a bit earlier than usual.
Result: the paths in that part of the Dene are navigable without vegetation crowding in from both sides.
Eight volunteers assembled this morning at the metal gate on Hartley West Farm road for another morning of strimming, on a day of mixed sunshine and showers that was rather cold for the time of year.
We managed to clear the verges of both the high and low paths from below Hartley West Farm to right past the bench at the Silverhill five-bar gate.
Here’s a picture of us strimming (which must be familiar sight by now!):
Photograph A. Strimming
Just to give an impression of how tall the weeds and grasses are now, here’s a pair of before-and-after pictures of the section just west of the Silverhill gate.
Photograph B. Before
Photograph C. After
Everyone passing by were friendly and thanked us, and all dogs were
on leads, except one that was in a pushchair!
Don’t forget to take a look at the Friends of Holywell Dene page on Facebook from time to time. There are some fab photos of the Dene and its wildlife in there.
You don’t need a Facebook account. Just put “Facebook Friends of Holywell Dene” into your favourite search engine and you should see it. If you get a “See more on Facebook” box, just click it away. If you want to post to that page, you would need to create an account.
Strimming was again the task facing the working party this morning, on the eastern side of the estuary and up the footpath from there towards the Hartley Lane carpark.
We had four strimmers going, each with an operator accompanied by a raker. The hedge trimmer was also in use, although it was being temperamental from the point of view of starting. (To avoid this, we were advised by a passer-by to add “fuel stabiliser” to the fuel, so we Googled that at break time and might get some.)
Photograph A. Strimming
Photograph B. Hedge-trimming
By the end of the session we had strimmed the steep path down from Millfield (Seaton Sluice) and the low-level path from there northwards part-way towards St. Paul’s Church and also southwards part-way towards the Hartley Lane carpark.
Our Friends chairperson came along and chatted. She was going to plant some cowslips by the estuary path. They are locally sourced wild plants from a place where they were otherwise going to be pulled out and thrown away. They should brighten things up if they take.
Incidentally, an otter was spotted bridge a few days ago by one of us: in the water under the Seaton Sluice road; she was showing us a short video of it on her mobile phone.
Quite a few dog-walkers passed us, especially around mid-morning and, as usual, we took care to halt strimming while they were going by. It’s always worth remembering that it is a good idea to take your lead with you if out walking the dog on Tuesday morning, so that your dog can be kept safe while going past the strimmers.
Luck must have been with us because the weather held – despite feeling all the time as if rain was imminent – until we were packing up, when somebody detected a few spots of rain. Sure enough some intense showers followed – but by then we were home and dry!
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