park on the top car park
A lovely day for our last visit to cut bracken this summer.
Undoubtedly we have not covered the same amount of ground now we no longer have an auto-scythe, but we have still made a good impression, adding to many of the existing piles of composting bracken. We use a mixture of scythes, slashers and sickles, with some of the sparser areas being pulled by hand. I walked down to where we had started off in 2002 – we have cut an impressive patch, creating space for heather, bilberry and crowberry.
I didn’t achieve my ambition of glancing upon a short-eared owl silently quartering the hillside (it’s been years since I have seen one), but we disturb quite a few red grouse and could see buzzards over Rombalds Moor.