Yes,at last, my planning application has been validated and accepted. I should get a yeah or neigh by 21st April, latest. Fingers crossed we may soon be able to put up Vera’s shed and maybe dig a pond! Permission may come too late to get the bigger scrapes done due to the nesting season but we’ll see, the planners may surprise and be quick but I will not hold my breath😉.

Well after a couple of days in the digger I now have an almost complete pathway through the reserve, just about 20 metres of floating boardwalk over the water to make it complete.

I did disturb a little resident but thankfully he wasn’t hurt, just a little confused:

John and I are continuing to build our storage shed, it’s not looking too shabby.

Just finished digging the base out for the new classroom we want to put in. Now we wait for Corrillion to deliver the road base they have promised.

John meanwhile is doing a grand job of building a wood store from our pallet stock.

Yes, Planning Permission In, its official and it has been acknowledged my application is in. Fingers crossed the planners will not need any further info and they pass it quickly, I know naive of me!!

The road alongside the reserve has a low spot that always goes underwater when it rains. So with having the digger close at hand I decided to address this problem, which has the benefit of creating a small pond, job half done so far.

To clear the site for the new portacabin classroom I had to do a bit of trapping to ensure no little furry friends were squished. 16 humane traps set but only 3 residents captured and relocated. 2 bank vole and a shrew.

Quite a decent haul from my scrounging activities yesterday.

I had 3 members of Hepscott parish Council visit the reserve on Wednesday as part of the planning approval process. They seemed to be pretty  supportive of the whole enterprise, however, they did express concerns that a ‘change of use’ of the land may, in the future make it easier to change it again to residential use! I hope I was able to mitigate some of those concerns by offering a statement from the landowner and a longer licence term for the reserve. They seemed pretty pragmatic with common sense so hopefully they see the benefit to the local community, we will see.

Started preparing the second wildflower meadow area.

To be kind to the rodents I may have displaced I am using the scrapings to construct an observation mound with built in rodent housing.

We have also built a wind break wall with pallets in front of hide 1, we are using cut reeds in the pallet wall to fill in the gaps. This also helps with landscaping, I intend to tie in reeds to screen the pallets eventually.