I must apologise that the August newsletter is going to be a bit late. This is because of rapidly-moving developments at Alvecote Wood, our 11 acre ASNW in North Warwickshire. An idle discussion with the farmer of the adjacent land a few months ago has resulted in him offering for sale 9 acres of field next to the wood. This land is poor agriculturally - at least 3 acres are too wet to generate a good crop of wheat. However, it would allow us to connect our ASNW to a section of HLS land maintained by another famer, and thence to a SSSI managed by the County Council. There is also SSSI across the canal from this new land. Basically we could create a wildlife corridor, with a new pond/lake and island for nesting birds, new wet woodland, a new area of firewood crop/dry woodland and some wildflower meadow, plus a new hedgerow providing a great corridor right to the SSSI.
The decision has to be made before harvest, which is this week or next week. We heard today that subject to lots of legals, we can buy this field! So this dream will take a lot of hard work, but we will end up nearly doubling the size of our wood, adding new habitat types, and creating a legacy for the future, as well as incidentally providing a means of income from a wood-fuel crop.
All this has kept me from my duty. In addition we've been chasing escaped cows all week, some of which had sought refuge in our woods (it's a long story involving cows falling in the canal, the fire brigade getting them out and putting them on the wrong side of the canal, whence they went awol). This has taken hours and hours of our time.
Anyway, thought you'd all like to know that there are developments afoot here and I hope to report progress as things develop!