Bark spade and drawing knife are we Bats ?

Lesser horseshoes 'just hanging'

The March bat count took place on Wednesday with James & Mike at Sherborne in pretty wet conditions and alas without Maurice. On the plus side the number of Lesser Horseshoes were up on the February count [156] with 52[1] bats occupying the summer/transit roosts, 20 of those having moved from the main winter roost. So the final tally was 136 Bat cave, 6 Kennels, 39 Bothy and 7 Cellars with a grand total 188.  Temperature outside ~ 7.5C and inside a balmy 8C-9C with 97% humidity.

Here's one I prepared earlier

Its not only Sherborne where exciting new activities have started {with ~ 18 months duration} but its all action at Greystones as well. The new visitor centre building work is well under way, so much so we had to park at the nearby Co-Op car park. Today was spent with Tom at Greystones where further preparation work was to be carried out in support of an iron age Roundhouse build. The size of this build was going to be ~ 8m diameter of circular floor  with 10-15m? {can't remember figure quoted but thats very tall! ,correction welcome} roof height. Looking at the materials {oak and ash cordwood, hazel sticks and prepared faggots} it was hard for us to see how you could create any building  but as Tom pointed out it was akin to a rustic 'flatpack' without the usual instructions {no bad thing in my experience}. Add to this the addition of new tools: the bark spade {supplemented by sharpened normal spades} and the drawing knife  it wasn't getting clearer. The pictures may add some clarity? to this very early bark stripping and hazel shaping part of the build. It was another first for me and others so that's no bad thing.

Early stages of hazel pruning

Large stock of faggots for Roundhouse walls

Greystone cows as perplexed as us

Crude bark scraping and fine tuning with Drawing Knife

Some hard scraping of oak cordwood and more delicate DK smoothing

Interesting article in telegraph, I knew NT would get with the programme eventually? , even a statement from Andrea Leadsom who has been pretty invisible as Defra minister, lets face it Defra deputy Coffey is pretty hopeless.