Haydon Bridge

On our restock visit in March we planted 200 trees with help from a corporate group if 12 volunteers from Rheal Superfoods and Josh from Ecologi. Together with our lead Andy, and the landowners and their daughter, they tidied up stakes and removed grass from the tubes around half the existing trees, as well as planting the new saplings. A huge thank you to everyone who came out, and to the landowners for hosting.

The landowners are happy to let the western edge grow by itself, as that area is sparsely planted at the moment, a nice little experiment to see what nature will do. We’ll keep an eye on it, and check how it is doing when we return for our scheduled survey.

To keep mileage down, we sent local friend of the charity Oli Wood over to check out the state of things. Despite the long hot summer, we only lost 10% of the saplings this year. That’s 45 out of 470 in the top field and 25 from 250 in lower field.

Both areas have been fenced off from the sheep with a wide margin to let natural regeneration take place and the landowners have also replaced dead trees with small saplings e.g. oaks, more hawthorn, holly that they find growing in other parts of the field and replant before the sheep get them.

The alder like the damper area of the top field and they have replanted a few willow in that section in the autumn to fill any gaps.

The landowners told us they have named the surprisingly tall and healthy oak sapling “Phil” in his honour, and he is now nearly 8ft tall!

Phil took the excuse to cycle out from Newcastle along the River Tyne, a ride he would have done regularly when living up in Gateshead for a bit. The weather was beautiful and the river was stunning, if not quite overrun with Himalayan Balsam.

Our planting site in Haydon Bridge was right up top of the hill, where Phil got to work counting and recording notes on the state of things.

The oaks, usually taking a few years to come out of their guards, were already poking out the top. One of them was taller than Phil by a long shot, not a high bar to meet but absolutely unheard of for Oak saplings!

Only losing 24% of them despite the long thick grass and sunny hilltop was a big win, because the goal is 80% and 76% is a great first effort. We’ll come back with more trees and get some weeding done to give things an even better shot in 2025.

We had planned this as a a two-day event although we managed to complete the job in one day as we had a good turnout of volunteers. We planted the trees and shrubs in three areas of varying size across the site. There were some small areas of semi-natural ancient woodland nearby so this planting helped to link some of them. Perhaps this volunteer describes the day best; the flapjack handmade by the landowners certainly made an impression!

“Everything went well. Info email allowed me to find the event and there was a flag outside to inform me that I was at the right place. Those running the event were very welcoming and explained the tasks clearly for a complete novice. The weather stayed good, all the volunteers worked well, there was coffee and FLAPJACK so we got all the tasks done within a day.”