YACWAG Action

Action Team Work Parties

Work will not normally be done in rain. Wear old comfortable clothes and stout boots, preferably steel toe-capped (some sizes available on loan). If in doubt about the weather, ring 1 hour before. Tools and training will be provided. Please arrive promptly to ensure you hear the safety briefing, which is a condition of our insurance. For the dates / times/ venues of work parties see our Events Page to find out more about the Action Team see below

Yatton church has adopted The Living Churchyard Project, a national scheme to enhance churchyards for the benefit of grieving visitors and amenity use as well as for nature. More details here.

YACWAG is affiliated to the British Trust for Conservation Volunteers (BTCV). The many benefits of membership include insurance for our workparties and conservation tools; reduced price training for our members and conservation holidays.

More About The Action Team

History

The title The Action Team was coined several years ago, when conservation workparties were begun to meet the needs of the older children who had passed up through the ranks of the junior wildlife club, Watch, and needed amusing on a Saturday afternoon in a more grown up manner! Watch members had always done a little bit of physical work now and again, gardening here and there in the village, clearing bracken on Cadbury Hill, and making grass snake egg laying sites on the Cheddar Valley Railway line. It was discovered that some of the older boys were now involved with the Duke of Edinburgh Award. The Action Team (then run under the group Friends of Biddle Street SSSI) provided them with a means of notching up hours of community service and kept us in touch with children we had known since before they were eight years old!

Duke of Edinburgh Award links

For two years we maintained the Action Team as a young person's group, but as ever we found there were those who were fully grown up and also wanted to have a go! The birth of YACWAG gave a new impetus to the Action Team. With Action also in the title of the group, we felt confident that Action was what we were about. Through the Clevedon Open Centre of the Duke of Edinburgh Award Scheme we are still able to provide a service to local youngsters wishing to carry out nature conservation tasks for the community service part of their Award, and occasionally we have enquiries from other centres too. But we also welcome our members to get involved and enjoy healthy outdoor exercise keeping the nature conservation value of the Biddle Street SSSI boundary on the Local Nature Reserve high.

What the Team do

You don't need to be super fit to join in. The picture on the left shows two of our members laying a hedge to promote new growth in the hedge. Any level of strength and fitness is welcome. We provide tools and training in how to use them and undertake a range of activities on the Yatton-Congresbury section of the Strawberry Line. From time to time we might go elsewhere for a change of scene but usually we are working away on the line. The main task is knocking back the bramble. After thirty years or more of neglect it is very strong, so we need to keep cutting it back. On the stretches where we have done this for several consecutive years it is now beginning to give way to much more interesting flora. The tools used for this job include slasher, brushing hook (like a longhandled grass hook), loppers and then a rake to rake it all up. Raking the ground is important after clearance of bramble because it stimulates the seed bank in the soil to produce a crop of wildflowers. We rarely have bonfires on the Local Nature Reserve, but instead use all the clippings and rakings to make big heaps which provide habitat and cover for wildlife of all kinds. Some of these have been constructed in such a way as to be of value to egg laying grass snakes, while others provide hibernation sites for snakes, slow worms, toads and small mammals.

SSSI