Mask Wood – Further Progress
An ‘Outdoor Learning Area for Asby Endowed School was completed ‘in the proposed ‘Community Woodland’ of ‘Mask Wood’, an area which Asby Tree Group had planted-up with over 500 trees in the winter of 2022/23. The Group was also successful in obtaining a Farming in Protected Landscapes (FiPL) grant to continue to develop ‘Mask Wood’ as a ‘Community Woodland’, in partnership with the landowners, the Braithwaite family.
Signposted ‘permissive footpaths’ will be created in the woodland area, along with a viewing-point with a bench (a memorial bench for the founding Chair of the Tree Group, the late Dave Freak) and the installation of nest-boxes for birds and roosting boxes for bats. The whole area has been surveyed by the Cumbria Wildlife Trust, with over sixty flower and grass species identified.
It is intended that information about some of these grassland species will be presented to visitors to the woodland through the positioning of Information Boards. The children of Asby Endowed School very generously donated the profits from their early winter ‘Beetle Drive’ to Asby Tree Group and it is hoped to use this donation to purchase a suitable Information Board.
To ensure that a wide range of grassland species continue to thrive, it will be necessary to remove the sward in the late autumn each year, until the trees planted in the winter of 2022/23 are robust enough to cope with sheep being reintroduced to the wood for short grazing periods, to control the grass growth.
An announcement about the ‘official opening’ of ‘Mask Wood’ will be made through Asby Matters and the Asby Parish Message Service.
Here are some Asby Tree Group members working to remove the sward in ‘Mask Wood’:
- Fitz gives strimming his full attention
- Andy Frisby clears cut grass while Stephen Reeve strims
- Ian Hutchings extends his mythical figure repertoire from Father Christmas to the Grim Reaper
- Andrew Hewitt adopts a more traditional approach to removing vegetation
