Henllys LNR Car Park Sustainable Drainage Solution Update

 Its very sad, but not uncommon to see the vast amounts of flooding across rural and urban areas and the devastation this brings. Locally, there are loads of blocked drains and copious damage to roads. 

Our own mini-SuDS project funded by Keep Wales Tiday was finisheed a couple of years ago and is reported in the previous blog entry. What we were seeing was the car park itself was getting flooded as the drains were blocked by silt. 

These 2 pictures were a regular occurance after heavy rains.

The silt was coming from the grassy hill adjacent to the car park. As people were walking up or down the bank, desirelines would muddying up and vegetation being trampled. The rain then washed down these desirelines taking silt downhill, emptying into the car park and blocking the drains. Our solution to this was very simple in that we roped off some of the desirelines, planted some shrubby vegetation on here, dug a few little trenches which fed into small shallow silt traps and most importantly at the botttom of the hill, we built a retaining wall of oak sleepers, backfilled these with soil and overlaid these with our favourite native wildflower turf

The retaining wall with wildflwoer turf on top. The main access path to the right remains.

 (htps://twitter.com/HenllysLNR/status/1314828591805411328). We've recorded on our Facebook page and Twitter how well these have worked (https://twitter.com/HenllysLNR/status/1397112031971577856 https://twitter.com/HenllysLNR/status/1335321551051366400). 

Trench and mini-silt trap

Silt settles into wildflower turf and clean water drains through the gaps in the oak sleepers as well as over the top of the turf.

Since these were installed just over 2 years ago, there have been many storms bringing heavy rain to South Wales as well as many other heavy rainfalls. We have not had any occurances of the car park flooding in that time. The wildflower turf has been really succesful too bringing a wide variety of wildflowers which have been totally under our own management which has meant it hasn't been cut back too early i.e. while it is still in flower. Its been a haven for insects and we even recorded seen in the vegetation in December. Another great success for us at no cost to the Local Authority.

Local Places For Nature: Henllys LNR Car Park SuDS Project

The car park off Birch Grove which is the principal entrance for Henllys Local Nature Reserve has undergone significant biodiversity improvements thank to our Group's efforts over the years. This started with the Natural Buzz Project:

http://friendsofhenllyslnr.blogspot.com/2016/10/natural-buzz-natural-expansion-of-our.html

http://friendsofhenllyslnr.blogspot.com/2016/10/natural-buzz-ground-prep-for-bulb.html

http://friendsofhenllyslnr.blogspot.com/2016/10/natural-buzz-winter-flowering-area-and.html 

http://friendsofhenllyslnr.blogspot.com/2016/10/natural-buzz-bulb-delivery.html

http://friendsofhenllyslnr.blogspot.com/2016/10/natural-buzz-planting-with-henllys-ciw.html

http://friendsofhenllyslnr.blogspot.com/2016/10/natural-buzz-marking-out-areas.html

http://friendsofhenllyslnr.blogspot.com/2016/10/27th-october-2016-today-wildflowers2be.html

http://friendsofhenllyslnr.blogspot.com/2016/10/natural-buzz-wildflower-turf-laying.html

Updates on Twitter in reverse chronological order here: https://twitter.com/search?q=%40henllyslnr%20%23naturalbuzz&src=typed_query&f=live.

The uphill side of the car park hasn't had much improvement done to it, but has other issues. There are several shortcuts (desirelines) which have been used over the years to get down from the field into the car park. As we know, where people tread on a slope, it is only a matter of time until rainfall and the follows. This has happened several times over the years and especially during heavy downpours, the soil is stripped and washes down the bank into the car park and the silt is deposited along our watercourses and inevitably blocks the drains and floods the car park. This leaves a green slippery and smelly mess behind. The council eventually unblocks these drains, but it is a really low priority drain. What we needed was a SuDS project to address that. 

Luckily, Keep Wales Tidy announced a project in 2020 called Local Places for Nature, funded by Welsh Government (like our Natural Buzz project). This has small Starter Packages and larger Development Packages (https://www.keepwalestidy.cymru/pages/category/nature Grants still available July and Aug 2020). Each are divided into 3 parts with one of the larger packages, a SuDS project (https://www.keepwalestidy.cymru/nature-development-suds). We quickly applied and were successful in the first round of applications. We obviously needed a plan and permission from TCBC. 

We posted all of this information on our Facebook page and created a video to explain it all:

As I write this, have also completed the first part of this project, which is the retaining oak sleeper wall, which will act to collect all of the runoff from the slope. 

Brian and I worked on a Friday to built a proof of principal start to the wall using oak sleepers we had from another project. We also prepared all of the rest of the ground for the main delivery which was planned for a fortnight later. However, we had a call the following Wednesday from Travis Perkins saying all of the materials were on site at 8.30 am and were waiting for us. Well I had to pack up work for the day and worked from 8.30 am to 8.15pm to make the whole site was secure.Brian and I did this with help from my neighbour Yvette (early morning shift) and my wife Sally (late shift). All of this was done with 2 m social distancing in mind and only people from 2 households at any one time. With 2 more people we would have finished this hours earlier, but that's a pandemic for you. Ideally, we'd have built the whole wall first and then got the bags of soil delivered later where we'd have just cut the bags allowing the soil to fall where we needed it. As it happens we just had to cut the bags and do more shovelling instead. This is still much better than wheelbarrowing it. 

Anyway, I created this follow up video to help any other Groups who are doing this kind of work. One of the big problems is that many of the sleepers were not very good quality and were very warped. This also slowed us down a lot. Hopefully this video will help others:

The next stage will be installing the 2 x SuDS planters which will be very interesting as they weigh 130 kg each. Again, what we learn will help the other 21 projects. We'll be doing this in the 1st week of August and then we'll lay the wildflower turf in October time if it is cool enough. 

Henllys LNR CoVID-19 Home Wildflower Project

March 2020

Due to the CoVID-19 outbreak, several projects planned for Henllys LNR this spring and summer have had to be abandoned or postponed. However, the Henllys COVID-19 support Group gave me a chance to think about what we could do together even though we are all at home apart from each other.  from From this, the Henllys LNR Home Wildflower project was born. So far 45 different families across the area have come together to take part in transforming part of their gardens into native wildflower havens.

Map showing rough distribution of Households taking part

https://drive.google.com/open?id=19ihKs7BVbuyiE4zAyMeYB9QUi39qla52&usp=sharingI created a downloadable introductory document which helps local residents to understand what we are trying to do and contains all the recording sheets and guidance on what photos to take.
 
With help from Sammy Gawler, a local teacher, we have created a wildflower detectives series of activities to entertain and educate children at home. This work will also provide data which will be analysed by local children.

Finally, I created a "how to" document, which details how residents sow their native wildflower seeds. I also created a short practical demonstration on the principles of transforming areas of lawn into a wildflower meadow.

Links to downloads:
1. Introduction.
2. Wildflower Seed Detectives
3. How to prepare grounds and sow wildflower seeds
4. YouTube video of a practical demonstration of wildflower seed sowing

How to sow a wildflower area; an applied practical demonstration

Wildflower Seed Detectives

Oct 2018 - grass patch being dug over between my neighbour and our houses

Post-seeding and being tamped down

Same strip in June 2019

Same strip in June 2019 from above

Chamomile shark moth caterpillar (same strip) - July 2019.

Same wildflower strip (July 2019) 

Hoverfly on corncockle (same strip July 2019)

  You can view some of the wildflower areas across the project on the Facebook page here: https://www.facebook.com/groups/HenllysHomeWildflowerGroup

We’ve stopped updating on here, please see our Facebook Page

Dear all,

I’m afraid we’ve stopped updating the blog in favour of a more local targeted social media platform using Facebook. https://www.facebook.com/groups/FriendsofHenllysLNR/ To join, you just need to answer the 3 questions so we can verify your request.

Cheers,

Chris

Rain, pave, wash away, leaves have gone and blocked the drain

It can't have escaped your notice that we've had some pretty bad weather recently with the fallout of two storms, bringing heavy wind and prolonged rainfall and all this water has to go somewhere. In the face of an ever increasing drive to build new houses and a growing trend to pave over front gardens for extra car space (and less maintenance) less water is soaking into the ground and is taken away through drains. These drains enter into man-made channels:

Where these channels end, the water enters old streams and they simply can't cope with the increased volumes of water often resulting in large erosion issues. This is one of the reasons why we have put so much effort into protecting stream banks with our wooden bundles made from harvested willow from the LNR. These fill up with silt and work brilliantly.

These bundles were done several years ago and saved a huge erosion point from getting worse.

A big problem starts to happen with massive downpours, which is compounded by the heavy winds breaking off lager branches all accelerating natural autumnal leaf fall. Larger branches and twigs get washed and trapped against the metal grills of man made culverts, which make a kind of nest which gets lined with all the leaves, which cloggs up the flow of water. When this happens, the water levels back up , rise and even greater erosion and flooding occurs.

This was back in November 2014

Luckily, there is a department within Torfaen Council who have responsibility for drainage. However, it isn't just culverts they look after, it is also all the drains on all the roads in the county. It doesn't take too many autumnal leaves to block these drains, resulting in localised flooding. It is impossible for these teams to be everywhere all of the time and in fact a dog walker told me this evening that they were out cleaning the culverts on the LNR only last week. To help out and from time to time, we get out our muck rakes as volunteers and help to clear out the culverts which pass through Henllys LNR. Today was one of those days, in the pouring rain.

Before

After

Before

After

At the minute, the whole LNR is saturated and the ponds are full. There is surface water everywhere and the streams are all raging. The desire lines are all marshy (apart from on our Gwent High Sheriff's Community Fund path) and the water is just finding its own way down to the lowest point. I came across this really interesting rutted stream where the water just flows its way down off the main meadow and then disappears down a hole. This looks cool, but I don't know if it is washing the bank away creating a potential hazard. Only time will tell. This little stream only came about as a result of LNR users walking along a desire line on the main meadow and the water will always take the easiest route.

As a final word of caution, if you are visiting the LNR, bring your wellies (and a buoyancy aid).

Himalayan balsam, not so quick summary of our findings with data from 2014-17

As a young(ish), naïve(ish) volunteer in the early days of The Friends of Henllys Local Nature Reserve, I started looking at tackling Himalayan balsam.

Himalayan balsam 2009 (4 hours to clear) on the right in 2010 took 30 minutes to clear.

Many parts of England and Wales have this invasive non-native plant, not just along riverbanks where they take over, but also in woodlands, meadows and pond margins. These become dominant and outcompete almost all native vegetation in these areas, resulting in a huge loss of biodiversity.
--------------------------------
Interlude.
I got into an interesting discussion with a couple of people who think this plant should be left alone and in 30 years it will die away leaving new opportunities for other plants. They also suggest that they are better suited to our changing climate. I strongly disagree with their ideas as a catastrophic loss of plant biodiversity would be lost in the process. From 2009, Himalayan balsam has encroached into every habitat on our Local Nature Reserve. All these habitats would be stripped of ground flora which would be replaced by a mono-culture. Mono-cultures are very risky things. go ask a forestry professional about the impacts of covering so much of the UK in larch in hindsight of the recent devastating disease. Resilience to change comes through diversity. You may get lucky by putting all your chips on Himalayan balsam on the Earth roulette, but I think it is better to spread the risk across almost all flora.
--------------------------------

There are some great efforts to try and tackle this plant across the UK, but unless a more holistic approach is taken, you will never get rid of this plant. Realistically, this means starting at the head of water courses and working your way down. The photo above, did not remove Himalayan balsam forever, we've been picking this patch each year since 2010. In recent years, we have been going upstream of the Nature Reserve and tackling it there. This needs to happen everywhere in a coordinated way if there is any chance of success and to avoid wasted efforts of the past. For a larger watercourse, say the Taff, this means starting in Brecon and systematically moving your way down, or getting an awful lot of people to tackle it in a coordinated fashion. Will that work alone as a one off event? No. Himalayan balsam germinates as early as April and last year I found some in November. This means going back over the same sites over a full season of growth.

That leads to an important question of how many seasons would you need to do this for?

In 2013, thanks to a Welsh Government-funded Tidy Towns project awarded to Torfaen County Borough Council on the back of our volunteering work, large new areas of Henllys Local Nature Reserve became accessible. On top of this we were also getting some of the other areas where Himalayan was already being treated more under control. In one new patch in 2014, we found an area which was completely dominated by Himalayan balsam. You couldn't see more than 30 cm into this area. We tackled this and removed all of the balsam. In both 2015 and 2016, there was no visible difference to the density and abundance of Himalayan balsam before we again removed all of it. In 2017, however, the density was hugely reduced.

From this we think it takes 3 years to see a significant decrease in the seed bank. Seeds have a natural viability in the soil and after that they will rot. I imagine that work in this area needs to be followed up for the next 2 years. So 5 years of work altogether. So to do this on a larger scale would need an enormous resource of funding for 5 years to deliver.

The table below shows the effort our group has put into (and adjacent to) the LNR to clear Himalayan balsam over the last 4 seasons. We still have around 10 hours to clear what is left on the LNR in 2017, but we tackled the same area which we did in 2016. This backs up what we have been seeing this year.

Year	Vol. Hours	No. of events
2014	181	21
2015	212.5	8
2016	238.5	23
2017	62.75	20

Problems?
If we started in 2009, how come we are still spending so much time on it in 2017? Early on, we didn't get to tackle the whole Local Nature Reserve and that was before we considered the possibility of  seeding of our cleared areas from upstream. This will also be true of any other watercourse. I have seen tributary banks rammed full of Himalayan balsam, a Welsh Water sewage treatment plant in Cilfynydd totally overgrown with Himalayan balsam. I imagine lots of feeder streams are also in privately owned land and all of it needs to be sorted out in order to properly tackle this plant.

The costs do to this properly would be enormous. I can see why many people put their head into the sand (or soil) and say they can't/wont deal with it, and by general inaction by authorities the situation is going to get much worse. For us, I'm very pleased we haven't had our head in the sand and continue to be so proactive and make those inroads.

One thing is for sure, it'll be very interesting to revisit and comment on this article in 8 years time.

Improving access to green spaces and tackling inactivity - response to British Heart Foundation Report

The Physical Inactivity and Sedentary Behaviour Report was published on 3rd April 2017 from the British Heart Foundation and summarised on the BBC Website. In it, it claims 1 million Welsh adults (42% of the adult population) are inactive and the estimated healthcare cost of this is over £1 billion.  

 

What can be done about this?  Wildlife Trust Wales have suggested, following the BHF report, that "We need more green spaces".

I have to partially disagree with that as Wales is full of green spaces. Populations within the SE Wales Valleys are built around vast areas of green spaces. Moreover, Natural Resources Wales states that there are 20,750 miles of Rights of Way across Wales and 1/5th of Wales is open access land; that is plenty of green space.

 

One problem is that many of our green spaces are under-funded, under-resourced, under-supported and all the problems which spiral along with that.

 

Some lessons could be learned from the relative new kid on the block (Parkrun). Parkrun has been a revelation and has 10,000s of people running across the UK each Saturday morning. The group mentality of Parkrun brings people together in a shared experience and critically includes the couch to 5k scheme, which encourages and signposts people with lower fitness and confidence up to full Parkruns. We need green spaces with good access and signage to encourage people to use these spaces. To get to my local Gwent Wildlife Trust site at Henllys bog I need the same equipment I'd need if I was going up the Brecon Beacons in changeable weather. The paths are ill defined, often overgrown in summer and totally boggy for the other 360 days of the year. These issues aren't Wales' Local Authorities' fault. They have been suffering cutbacks for years and years and sadly often only responding to complaints from the public. I'm not talking about improving access to every mile of footpath and bridleway across Wales, I'm suggesting focussing on those which are closer to areas where people live and there have been some good strides to do this in our borough, but it is largely grant-funded.

 

The work we have just started here on the LNR with the Gwent High Sheriff's Community Fund path project is tackling just that. Nothing says your not welcome here like the access in the picture below on the left. Furthermore, you spend so long with the struggle, you forget to enjoy the benefits of why you came here in the first place and the your hall is full of mud and you're in trouble. This is not going to get people from couch to green space.

 

The other angle we use which appears to encourage increased activity is to invite the local schools to come out and we deliver real functional practical outdoor activities. We've seen decreased anti-social behaviour and we've seen more adults walking on the LNR with children following these events. We've recently seen lots of small children showing off their cards at the entrance to the LNR, often with grandparents. Hopefully, they've also seen their snake's head fritillaries, snowdrops and primroses which they planted in October 2016 in flower this year. Getting children to take part in outdoor work not only gets them more interested in green spaces at a young age, but they also have more respect for their environment, more appreciation and more ownership. Best of all, they are also having fun.

 

The final part to do is to support community groups and groups of volunteers to undertake practical improvements to green spaces (like we and many others do). There is less money for staff and less money for contractors, but with the right framework in place more volunteer groups can be supported. Volunteering makes a huge positive mentally and physically difference to an individual, they develop a Parkrun-like collectiveness and the wider public get improved green spaces. If you play this well Wales, there is a pool of around 1 million of them waiting to be tapped into and a health bill of over £1 billion and rising if you do nothing.

New paths - we dig it

"The right path is often the hardest to follow, but the hard path is also the one that leads to the greatest growth."

Well that is the inspirational mantra for the path-laying part of our Gwent High Sheriff's Community Fund project which started on Friday 24th March 2017.

 

The plan is to create 200 metres of path which is shown in orange. This links up all the entrances on Henllys Way offering easier access routes at the southern end of the LNR. The problem with those areas currently is that they are very boggy and the path is getting wider and wider with more habitat being lost as people try and use slightly firmer ground. This is natural behaviour even in wellies as the ground is extremely slippery. These pathways will eliminate this problem.

 

The paths are being copied from the work carried out in 2013 (yellow lines) by contractors, except it is all being dug out and laid by hand, by volunteers.

 

Essentially, the ground is dug up by 80 cm wide and at least 10cm deep. We measured the old paths at around 1 inch depth, but in parts these are wearing out, so we're going a little deeper. As we've been digging it out, we've been carefully laying out the spoil on the uphill side of the path to allow water to freely run off the path. Before we lay the path we will dig in some drainage pipes where necessary. We've been actively tweeting after each session and you can find these by following us on @HenllysLNR .

 

Here are some of the pictures so far:

 

 

In the last 2 pictures we volunteered for around 7 hours altogether and my Fitbit blaze reckoned that I had burned 5300 calories over that 24 hours which is the most I've ever burned in a day in 2 years of Fitbit history (2900 calories more than a sedentary day in the office). Doing good for the LNR and doing exercise at the same time, what is there not to like about that?

 

 

The Gwent High Sheriffs' Community Fund Presentation

We were recently shortlisted from hundreds of applications for the Gwent High Sheriff' Community Award. On Saturday morning, we had 2 minutes to convince the panel and largely the other applicants that we were deserving of £4000 to undertake some more work on the LNR. We had a meeting to discuss what we would do based upon feedback from the grant managers, Community Foundation in Wales (CFIW), who judged our project to be a lower priority with questionable links to the aims of the fund (It is good to have these checks). Luckily for us, this feedback allowed us to focus our presentation. When I read it out at 7am on the day, this was 4.5 minutes long, which we deemed would be frowned upon. So butchered it down to 2 minutes, if we made no errors. The nice thing about a 2 minute presentation is you can rehearse it a few times and change things very quickly. we practised at 9 am and by 9.05 am we were happy.

We arrived at the venue early and found we were towards the end of the first half of the presentations, so had to be patient. The early presentations were very good and set the scene for the day. Those butterflies started up just before the group before us and we were gobsmacked by them. The group did a mini-performance of Les Miserables, which didn't help us much. However, we gathered our wits, checked our trouser flies, and flung ourselves into it like seasoned pro's and Brian even put a bit of Marlon Brando into his performance, like he promised. Anyway, we were delighted when they read out our names as being one of those chosen for funding. There was around £70k up for grabs and all the projects added up to £90k, so sadly quite a few groups did miss out.

 

So firstly we'd like to thank Steve Williams, our ecologist from TCBC who approved our project in the first place and secondly to Cllrs. Thomas, Cross and Cameron who wrote letters of support which were needed in order for us to submit in the first place.

There are several parts to this work, the main part is creating 200 metres of path which join up all of the gates on the entrances on Henllys Way to the new path created in 2013. This will then continue down to the edge of the meadow mirroring the path on the orchard side of the main meadow.

We want to turn the path as it is (left) to something which will resemble its sister on the opposite side of the meadow (right)

The big problem with the path on the left isn't just the difficulty of walking through the clayey mud, it is getting wider and wider as people naturally avoid the worst parts. This is increasing erosion and decreasing our areas margin vegetation. Moreover, alternative routes are being used now, which are creating new channelling points for water. Hopefully once the hard work has been completed, this would be a thing of the past. These hard paths aren't invasive to the LNR, but preserve it and improve access for all.

 

The next part is to construct steps down the grasscrete slope where we had to move the 25 tonnes of limestone recently (too many blog entries so just type "gabions" into the blog's search engine). This will be a very challenging and interesting project. There is also a very small boardwalk to be built at the bottom of the steps we built with TCBC Ranger Jon several years ago.

Steps2be on the left and boardwalk2be on the right (over the bog)

all these improvements are shown here:

Red are the paths2be, light blue is the steps2be and green is the boardwalk2be. Yellow shows the existing harder paths

Progress was started at 6am on Sunday morning with the calculations for the steps2be. At 7.30am I didn't believe the angles, so triple checked the double checking, just to make sure (Cheers again Graham).

Measuring the slope of the grasscrete hill, by 2 different methods

Measuring the length of the slope and the dimensions of the steps

One of the important things I've missed out is who is doing the work. There will be a mixture of our group and a call out for more volunteers, but the largest part will be done with local young people. Some of these will be from the upper echelons of the local primary school who love a bit of digging and shovelling. However, some will be with new contacts made recently with Cwmbran High School and Monmouthshire and Torfaen Youth Offenders. The main part of our presentation was about the affect that doing these works has on local young people and how they develop a sense of ownership and pride and this builds community support and decreases anti-social behaviour on the site. We used the analogy of a woodcrete bird box which was bought for us in 2013. It is lovely, well made, lasts for a very long time, but there is no ownership, interest or pride involved with this (only the birds like them). However, our handmade bird boxes which built and camouflage painted by local school children have an emotional investment which is invaluable, while the birds seem to like these ones too.

 

We'll keep you posted with updates and events.

SpringClean and a pizza celebration to end a great day

Some time ago when Big Lottery Fund Wales offered community groups the chance to get up to £2000 towards a celebration, we thought what's the catch? The answer was none. We've never really celebrated the work which we've done on the LNR, but we thought well why not. Not long after submitting an application we found out we were successful.

The largest part of the grant was a branded gazebo, a portable pizza oven and £600 on food, drinks and associated sundries. Our 3 m x 3 m, Pro-50 gazebo from Gala tents arrived ages ago, but stayed away in its case for a long time, until we put it up just before the event. Even then, on the day was the first time we put one of the side panels up. Unlike our cheapo Draper gazebo which broke at the Henllys fete 2 years ago (at its first outing), this one is very, very sturdy, easy to put up and take down and will hopefully last us many years.

 

The oven was the longest wait. When we first thought we'd like a pizza oven which we wanted a portable on and there were a few options. Most of them were around 70-100 kg which wasn't quite portable enough for us and they take an hour to warm up. Then there were some cheaper ones like the Uuni II which Lakeland sells. The Uuni looked good, but it only ran on wood pellets, which we thought was a limitation for us. By chance, we came across Roccbox who were a croudfunded company and we really liked how it looked, its size, weight and how it comes with a wood burning and gas burning attachment. As it was croudfunded, it took a long time for our batch to made and send to us (4 months), but it was totally worth the wait. we had a "few" trial sessions before our celebration event and it warms up in 20 minutes (compared to an hour or so for a traditional pizza oven, its compact size means it uses less fuel and as it gets so hot (500 degrees C) it cooks pizzas in 1.5 - 2 minutes.

The big advantage of the Roccbox is that we can have a quick turnaround if we have a big group. We knew we would do this as we wanted to celebrate the difference which Henllys CIW and 1st Henllys Cubs and Beavers have made to us and to the LNR in general. The £600 (minus some extra safety gear and tools) should keep us in pizza for the rest of the year. One of the things we wrote about in the application was using wood which we harvest from the LNR to fuel the oven, so that should be quite exciting too.

So while the #SpringCleanCymru #TorfaenSpringClean litterpick was taking place Tricia (our food safety hygiene ninja) and Nic started getting all the prep area set up and I joined them after about 45 minutes of litterpicking and making sure everyone was OK. After about 1.5 hours people started coming back to the car park with all the bags of rubbish. We encouraged everyone to wash their hands in Henllys Rangers FC changing room and to gel rub sanitise them afterwards and that is when the fun started with the food and drink.


Our very first pizza as part of the Celebration event

It was the first time we'd ever hung around after an event to do anything like this really and it gave everyone a good opportunity to have a chat to one another.

Those gabion pins and tape came in handy to secure the hot zone

Tricia, Bri and Nic were superstars with rolling out the dough from Greenmeadow Community Farm and getting the toppings ready... 

The production line and committee: Nic, Brian and Tricia. This was at the end of the event when we could let our hair (and aprons) down

...and the pizzas went in and came out the Roccbox as quickly as advertised. The feedback from everyone over the pizzas was amazing including "best pizza ever" by 3 different people.

and the committee all managed to get theirs after everyone else finished.

Just like a brochure! Not Welsh cakes made by Brian's wife.

It was one of the hardest events we have ever run, but it was also one of the most rewarding. We are unbelievably grateful to Big Lottery Fund Wales for the opportunity to do something like this. It made us all feel really good about what we have done on the LNR over the years and the support we have for this locally.

Importantly for us as a group, it was our last ever event with Tricia, our friend and secretary, but what an exit eh Tricia? We will truly miss you.

#SpringCleanCymru #TorfaenSpringClean - Biggest non school event since we started

As a Community Group we focus on Henllys Local Nature Reserve. However, from time to time, we join in with larger national events such as Clean Coasts Week and Be Tidy. We like to do this as it demonstrates we are part of a much bigger picture with lots of other groups and individuals across Wales, the UK and the world. #SpringCleanCymru / #TorfaenSpringClean was something very similar. It was all a part of a UK-wide campaign by Keep Britain Tidy, but in Wales it had a much more Welsh-pride themed campaign managed by Keep Wales Tidy. Parallel to that Torfaen County Borough Council ran their own campaign Torfaen Spring Clean which supported groups within the borough alongside their own deep cleanse. Both have been really brilliant with some lovely stories.

We advertised our event alongside our BLF celebration event which followed immediately afterwards with free pizza, but we also had excellent coverage from both TCBC and KWT. We got set up nice and early and were totally blown away by the numbers of people who turned up to help. Altogether we had 25 people take part in our Spring Clean and we think around 23 full bags were collected. This was the biggest turnout we'd had at any event which didn't include the school, cubs or beavers.


Some late arrivals, didn't make it into our picture!!

Nearly all of the litter was from around the main culvert, some of this is from Llys Gwrydd as we can see where it is has been dumped down the hill behind houses into the stream, but lots of if also comes from being washed down smaller culverts further upstream coming straight from the roads.


When the culvert blocks after storms, the water levels rise here to a very high level. It then drops all that plastic (and some much heavier items) as well as Himalayan balsam seeds over all this area.

Sadly, most of this plastic bottles and drink cans and the same things are happening all across the world. It is estimated that 80% of all marine litter enters the sea from human activities on land. We can only imagine that it will not be too long before there is a Deposit Return Scheme in Wales where everybody pays more for drinks and you get money back when you return the empty containers. If people still drop their cans and bottles on the floor, more fool them, and we'll soon pay for our group insurance when we pick it up after them. We imagine that if behaviour change occurred overnight with 5p on a single use carrier bag in Wales, then 5-10p on every can or bottle of drink will do the same and there will be even less litter blighting our land and oceans.

The 25 people who turned up were a great cross section of local users of the LNR and is really pleasing for us as a small community group that so many people really care about our little green space. It is very pleasing for us when we hear so many positive comments about the LNR. We were pleased to see and catch up with our friend Cllr. Collete Thomas who generously gave us a £100 cheque which will either pay for our insurance, or we'll put it to something else on the LNR. We also had several Henllys Community Councillors, who also really enjoy getting stuck in.



Evie is a true conservation hero on the LNR, her dormouse boxes have blue tits and wood mice nesting in them and now she's out litterpicking with us. Maybe a little bit of positive support from her parents too ;-)

We were overjoyed to get a contact with Cwmbran High School through the Chair of Coed Eva Primary School, Peter Friswell. Peter has been a long-time supporter of our work, as well as a one of the wheelbarrow heroes. We've been trying for years to work with CHS (Fairwater High School when we first started trying) and we are really hopeful that we can do some great things together.

We were also lucky enough to finally meet up with Monmouthshire and Torfaen Youth Offenders. We've been like passing ships in the night for over a year now and they are really keen to work with us. We've been hesitant in the past to work with any community payback scheme as we wanted people to genuinely want to get involved with what we were doing and were concerned that we didn't want our work associated with punishment or someone else's responsibility. We were also worried that it would add another excuse to those people think it is OK to litter as either 1. it keeps people in a job. or 2. you should get the criminals to pick it up. We think that looking after your local area is not a punishment, but the right thing to do and littering is simply the wrong thing to do. Convincing such people to change their behaviour is very difficult, but it is exactly the reason why we focus our work with local primary schools as we want to break that behavioural cycle. Now we have so many LNR users and local people on our side, we are confident that we can incorporate what the Youth Offenders can do with us for our mutual benefit. We also think that by them doing something more constructive than litter picking, they'll feel like they have done something useful and contributed positively to society (We've got some nice projects in the pipeline subject to funding).

We finally have to thank TCBC for collecting all of the litter and fly tipping. We can't do this without their support. We also had to borrow extra litterpicking equipment from Keep Wales Tidy, so thank you to Thom Board and Gareth Davies for that.

Thank you @torfaencouncil for taking our #SpringCleanCymru / #TorfaenSpringClean #litter away #partnershipworks (& finding a forgotten hoop) pic.twitter.com/VnXxDrkJrO

— Chris Partridge (@HenllysLNR) March 14, 2017

All we need is just a litle patience

Sometimes this volunteering and conservation work takes a while for positive changes to be seen. Back in 2011 we started building up a small group of volunteers and in 2012 we started working more closely with Henllys CIW School. One of the simplest things we could do to engage and benefit wildlife was to build habitat boxes.


June 2011. Beau, who is now in high school shows off one of our very first dormouse boxes

November 2012. Henllys CIW Ecoclub are building and camouflage painting bat and dormouse boxes

December 2012. They are back installing these boxes which they made with us

Like many of our projects, we often do these activities for people and wildlife and we often hope it is of benefit. We inspected these boxes annually and the best thing we ever saw was a massive black spider and we quickly closed the lid.

April 2016. Local resident Evie and friends helped to paint more dormouse boxes with crayons

Within one month, one of Evie's boxes contained nesting blue tits, which was amazing as the hole points towards the trunk of the tree.

May 2016. Nesting blue tits are in dormouse box #1 only a month after installation

However, in May 2016, none of the other boxes contained any life apart from woodlice, worms, slugs and spiders. However, earlier today these boxes were all inspected and three of the dormouse boxes contained signs of mouse nests, with one of them containing gnawed hazel nuts.

Mar 2017. Dormouse boxes from 2011, 2012 and 2016 all have evidence of mouse activity and nests

There is a way of determining what creatures chewed upon them, but it is a skill which I have struggled with. After sending them to TCBC's ecologist Steve Williams, he quickly decided they were probably wood mice, which makes sense as I had previously photographed a wood mouse on one of the bird feeders in my garden. Importantly, these have only been occupied from May 2016. I'm sure those children, whom many are in high school now would be pleased to know that their efforts have indeed been fruitful and probably been a host to baby wood mice. It is a very warming thought.