Fountains Abbey |
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| Location Map |
Working Holiday Details
Fountains Abbey |
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| Location Map |
Date: 5th - 7th April 2002 |
| Location: Fountains Abbey & Studley Royal, North Yorkshire |
| Basecamp: Whitefields Cottage - Studley Royal Estate |
| The volunteers present: | National Trust | |
Alison Angela Judith Linda Pauline |
Neils (Leader) Alistair Bill David Frank Gary Rob |
Kath (Volunteer Co-ordinator) John |
This weekend was not one of the usual Working Holidays, but was a Grassroots Weekend. The aim of these weekends is to draw together around 30 volunteers to work alongside the landscape team and focus all their energies on a large maintenance task on the estate.
As well as the 12 of us staying at Whitefields Cottage there was also a further 12 volunteers staying at the Druids Cave Basecamp at Brimham Rocks, led by Gerry.
| Tasks undertaken. | |
| The high main task for this weekend was to improve the access road to
St. Mary's Church in the Studley Royal Park. A new portion of roadway about 50 metres long was created to allow cars to turn onto the church road without having to drive on to the grass. Wooden railings was also put up alongside the entrance road into the park. |
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The roadway task involved removing the grass turf and then digging out
the edges of the roadway. A semi-permeable membrane was then laid along the length of the road and covered with sandstone chippings, transported by many, many trips of wheelbarrows. A motorised road roller was then used to shape and compact the roadway. |
| As the work on the roadway had progressed really well we were asked to
undertake a second task. A tree plantation on the edge of the estate had been planted with a varied mixture of trees eight years earlier. The gardeners now wanted to encourage the trees to grow taller and straighter so it was necessary to prune off all of the lower branches up to height of five feet. The plantation was about half a mile long, starting at about 50 metres wide, stretching to a couple of hundred metres wide at the end. |
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The grass that had been removed for the roadway was loaded onto a
trailer and taken to another part of the estate. A group of volunteers then had the task of relaying this grass. The ground had to be broken up first to encourage the grass turfs to root properly into the soil. |
The Grassroots weekends are quite different from the normal Working Holiday weekends as all of the volunteers have been to Fountains Abbey before and most of the group already know each other.
The large group allows major projects to be undertaken and there is a great sense of satisfaction at seeing so much work completed in just one weekend.
On the Saturday evening the whole group went off to the Half Moon Inn at Fellbeck, where a pre-arranged pub quiz was held. I am very proud to say that I was a member of the winning team!
