Environment
Week Gets Mucky
Another year, another summer and another week of environmental work for
students at
Swadelands
School
. As the sun gloriously shone
over Charing Heath, 25 students, under guidance from the Kentish Stour
Countryside Partnership committed themselves to a week of conservation and
outdoor exploration.
The environmental week takes place on land owned by the Heaths Countryside
Corridor, a community group dedicated to protecting tracts of land that
have been dissected by the Channel Tunnel Rail link.
One of their sites, Bull Heath, is a disused sand quarry, home to a
huge diversity of plants and animals with large areas of rare lichen
heath. Pyramidal orchids (Anacamptis
pyramidalis) and viper’s bugloss (Echium vulgare) splash colour
across the site and sand martins (Riparia
riparia) visiting through the summer months provide exceptional aerial
acrobatic displays as they catch prey on the wing.
The site provides a quiet retreat for reptiles and larger mammals
including badgers too.
However, without a dedicated task force of students, the site would
quickly become overgrown and therefore loose its valuable and delicately
balanced diversity. One week
of scrub clearance, coppicing, path maintenance and invasive plant control
and the site is ensured of its colourful and unique future.
Students cleared large areas of scrub to create glades within which
wild
flo
wers will
flo
urish as sunlight can now penetrate to the previously un-warmed soil.
Increasing wild
flo
wers will directly increase moth and butterfly populations as their food
source becomes more plentiful.
It wasn’t only the wildlife that benefited from the environment week.
Steve Kirk, local Kent Mammal Group member and editor of Bushcraft
Magazine was on hand to impart his knowledge on mammal natural history as
well as enthuse students on the wonders of the green world and its
resourcefulness about them. The
students learnt woodland skills including shelter building, mallet making
and atlatl (pronounced atulatul) throwing, a historic form of spear used
for hunting.
The week was triumphantly rounded off with local sausages cooked over a
camp fire served with fresh local apple juice.
The Heaths Countryside Corridor own sites in Charing Heath and Lenham
Heath including designed parkland and ancient woodland.
To discover more about the sites or to get information on how to
find them look on their website at www.heathscc.co.uk/.
