Sunday 3rd being a tad wet we settled for having a meeting to discuss our work programme for the coming year so this week was really the beginning of our New Year.
Starting as we mean to carry on we are tackling the last gorse block on the Firehills to be removed in the current scrub reduction. This was to have been the subject of a controlled burn as a joint training exercise involving East Sussex Fire and Rescue, the Ranger team and us volunteers in November but had to be cancelled at the last minute.
This is possibly the single biggest area of gorse that we have cut down in one go measuring 0.6 acre according to my GPS and working Thursday and Friday this week we have already reduced it by a third. See map below, the area inside the blue line shows how much we have cut. This was mapped on the ground with GPS.
It is amazing to see how far in to scrub that we find tennis balls, we should have kept a count over the years but it is also surprising how little litter we have found here particularly in comparison to when we were in the Quarry last year. The notable exception was the can in this photo.
This prompted the obvious question. The best Volunteers in the world? Probably!