barely connected

We barely have broadband.  If the rest of this post doesn't appear, that's why it's not there.

Addendum  Right, that's posted.  Now to flesh out the narrative, if the connection holds up.  I tried to post in the early evening, before going out, and found I didn't have the internet.  It's lucky that I'd made a note at lunchtime when the broadband was still working of where I was going, and what time I had to be there.  I tried again when I got back and still couldn't get a connection.  Finally, at gone 10.0pm, I can plug myself in to the world wide web.  Did I mention that BT broadband wasn't very good round here?

I was going on a walk around a local nature reserve and adjacent Woodland Trust site, led by somebody from the Essex Wildlife Trust, which I got invited on by someone I met at the woodland volunteers conference last month.  I'd never visited either site, and thought it would be interesting to see them, and nice to meet some other people actively involved in woodland conservation and creation, as a change from talking about it.

The Essex Wildlife Trust reserve occupies former gravel workings near Clacton on Sea.  Most of the trees and plants on the reserve arrived by themselves after extraction ceased, though the warden has planted a few things, such as buckthorn which is the food plant of some butterfly, and a white flowered thing called corky fruited water dropwort seems to have come in on their grass cutting machinery, since it wasn't originally found in these parts and now grows all over the place on their reserves.  There are good views across the Holland Brook, which was an inlet of the North Sea until it was dammed in the early eighteenth century.

The Woodland Trust area was planted seventeen year ago by a local group, several of whose founder members were there this evening.  They clubbed together to buy a field that wasn't being used for much, planted it up in association with the Trust, and eventually made it over to the Trust so that its long term management would be secured.  After seventeen years the new area looks like a proper wood, and it must be gratifying for the people who made it happen to see it now.  In fact quite a few of the planted trees died, and the site has continued to develop into broadleaf woodland by natural regeneration, but they had the idea and got the ball rolling.

Lawyers did not emerge from the tour particularly well, having apparently created great difficulties about the Essex Wildlife Trust managing the Woodland Trust part by mutual agreement, as they fussed about the boundaries, and an EWT attempt to buy a further tract of land for which they had funding had shipwrecked on the rock of lawyers jibbing at uncertainly over the access rights.  I gathered that the process of the local group handing their project over to a national charity had not been entirely smooth, the original owners sometimes feeling that the Trust weren't doing enough with the site.  I didn't get to hear the other side of the story, though I did have some difficulties convincing some of the locals that I was strictly a volunteer and didn't know anything about it.  I guess the Trust's idea of how the new wood should be managed may have been less intensive than some of its progenitors had imagined.

Anyway, it was very pleasant, and we saw a barn owl box that had been inhabited this year by various birds but not barn owls, and a tawny box that did have tawnies in it (so we were told.  Never look into a box you think might contain tawny owls.  Apart from the fact that you are not supposed to disturb them, they will attack your face and they go for the eyes).