We are proud to announce that we’ve passed over 20,000 visitors that we’ve brought into the woods.
Fairy Forest School operates through licence agreement with the Woodland Trust to host activities in several woods in and around Warrington.
Since we started in December 2014 we’ve helped 20,000 children and attending adults access nature - including families with children, schools, nurseries, adventure scouts and brownies, charities such as Friends - play for disabled children, community groups and even the odd family social for organisations like the Environment Agency based in Warrington.
We’ve been fortunate to carry out activities at woods such as Lumb Brook Valley in Appleton, Gorse Covert Mounds in Birchwood Warrington, Snidley Moor in Frodsham, New Moss Wood near Cadishead and St Benedicts Wood in Rainhill.
We’ve carried out an array of activities and outdoor learning events. These super fun activities are a great way to get our visitors to carry out conservation and foster care for the wood and its inhabitants such as;
Getting in Lumb Brook is massively popular
Flower fairy hunts to identify and learn about common woodland flowers
Den building and coppicing/ bracken clearing to get more light on the forest floor and increase biodiversity
Fairy Village Making to get children (and parents too) to imagine what its like to be a tiny inhabitant of the wood
Bear Hunts and Fairy Tale Character Hunts to explore the Woodland
Pond Dipping and stream play and walks to learn what’s lives in the water whilst exploring and having fun
Hedgehog Habitat Building making dead hedges using coppiced hazel
Gruffalo sessions creating log piles for good detritovore habitat and hibernating woodland mammals, insects and amphibians.
And of course, Forest School Programmes to foster overall long term learning on safety skills, social skills and caring for nature as part of our “Look after yourself, each other and the wood” ethos.
Regular visits to the wood has also had the added bonus that we’ve helped to achieve the Trust’s Woodland Management Objectives
We carry out a site risk assessment for the places we visit which includes checking trees are safe especially after a storm. Even if we can’t deal with the hazard ourselves we still report it to the Woodland Trust so they can take the necessary action. Its not just trees - we’ve also put up warning signs to make other wood users aware of things like wasps nests near to where people might walk.
We’ve coppiced lots of hazel on rotation to help re-establish a copse - great for specific types of insects and woodland mammals that love coppiced stools (tiny stumps), great for plant biodiversity as more light hits the forest floor, great for detritovores as there’s more dead wood to feed on and great for other insects and carbon uptake as coppiced hazel has a surge of regrowth.
We’ve spotted and uprooted invasive species that have sprung up to curtail their spread including rhododendron and Himalayan Balsam, either to stop them getting established or to help keep them under control. At Gorse Covert Mounds we’ve pulled up massive amounts of bracken to create a green thatch for dens but left other types of slow growing fern in the hope that we get more plant diversity as bracken tends to get out of hand and take over if its not controlled.
After 8 years and 20,000 visitors we’ve seen how the woods have changed
Gorse Covert Mounds has seen a massive investment form the Woodland Trust in partnership with the Carbon Landscape. Pestfurlong Moss was a seasonally dry moss which, using plastic sheeting, has been re-wetted to encourage the rare mosses present, create miniponds for amphibians and dragonflies and keep the peat wet. This means it will hold the fixed carbon dioxide and encourage a long-term carbon sink.
The Woodland Trust has invested year on year through TCV (The Conservation Volunteers) to all but eradicate Rhododendron in the woodland next to the moss. This invasive species prevents any growth on the forest floor and harbours tree diseases but now its pretty much all but gone.
Next to the moss is Pestfurlong Hill where Woodland Trust Volunteers (Friends of Gorse Covert Mounds) have been busy planting gorse. They’ve also planted a fantastic willow tunnel which we sometimes run through on the way to our base camp in the woods. Year on year we’ve pitched in when they do their litter picks and Spring Cleans and helped when they’ve done tree work for the trust.
Semi Ancient Lumb Brook Valley has a dynamic stream running through it and has personal family ties. My dad used to play in these woods in the 1940s/50 - well before the massive housing development in Appleton. Whilst visiting relatives we would often go “up the Dingle” in the mid 1970s. The Dingle is far more accessible than it used to be (just an informal muddy path which threatened to slip you down the bank into Lumb Brook below).
Its noticeable these days how much higher the stream can get when it rains and how much suspended silt is present. At the other end of the spectrum we also saw the stream nearly dry out in Summer 2018 with just a trickle flowing under the pebble bed between sad little puddles. How climate change and local land use changes from agricultural to housing is a concern. After a big rain you can see how the bank has eroded in parts. At one location on the advice of the Trust’s site manager we tried to plant Goat Willow to help stabilise the bank but unfortunately it didn’t survive.
Our Flower Fairies events at Lumb Brook has educated families about plant identification and the value of ancient woodland
When we first started in 2014 we set up base camp downstream from Ford’s Rough on Dingle Lane. However the manual handling involved in setting up base camp became too much of an exertion as it involved parking up and heading down the bank, crossing the stream then up the other side. We fairly quickly settled with a base camp just upstream of the Bridge (built 1795!) on Dingle Lane and reasonable close to the road. This location has helped us set up/pack up quickly and also let people with not so good mobility and people with pushchairs get into the woods as far as our temporary base camp.
Lumb Brook Valley is a delight in spring with an array of woodland flowers including Wood Sorrel, Wood Anemones, Kingcups aka Marsh Marigolds, Wild Garlic, Lesser Celandine, Lords and Ladies, Herb Robert and of course Bluebells - English ones too. The damp air from the stream also means mosses, liverworts, ferns and various epiphytes (plants living on other plants).
Over the years, with the trusts permission, we’ve tried to incorporate coppicing/pruning of hazel and juvenile sycamore to encourage more forest floor plant biodiversity (so they get more light) and also to stabilise the bank such as when we’ve pruned back the odd hazel tree that might topple and take the bank with it. The trust has also done some tree work to make the wood less dark and more diverse. We took advantage of the excess wood chip by barrowing it to base camp to prevent it getting too muddy plus spreading it around to make sure the bluebells would find it easy to poke through.
New Moss Wood near Cadishead was planted for the millennium by the Woodland Trust and volunteers on degraded peat farmland. Its such a new wood it hasn’t had the opportunity to develop a diverse understorey like Lumb Brook Valley. To make the wood accessible for play we had to rake out areas amongst vast swathes of nettles. These areas had started to get more diverse with weedy like flowers such as creeping buttercup and common hogweed. With us not being there over lockdown the nettles have started to come back as well as invasive Himalayan Balsam which is prevalent on the Manchester Mosses especially along waterways.
Just like at Pestfurlong Trust the Woodland Trust and Carbon Landscape has invested in plastic sheeting in bunds to create natural fens, bogland and ponds to re-establish wetlands for habitat and a carbon sink reverting the area back to how it must of been in neolithic times.
One concern with the wood is that it might be overwhelmed by new housing developments near Irlam. Hopefully common sense will prevail and the surrounding area will stay as farmland or even better be re-wet or rewilded.
Snidley Moor near Frodsham has its own hillfort, mature woods and extended new(ish) plants on the sandstone ridge. This hilly wood has hosted various events but what made it extra special was the neolithic den building we carried out on school trips on a guided tour of the hillfort and its earthworks plus the fantastic vista overlooking the Mersey Estuary. Unfortunately over lockdown the wood became a victim of its own popularity with new parking restrictions nearby making it inaccessible for us to drop off all the kit we need to host an event and provide safe parking for our guests. Its still a wonderful wood to visit for a walk especially on the Sandstone Trail that runs through it.
St Benedicts Wood in Rainhill is our newest Woodland Trust wood. We like this wood because we can drive right up to base camp with no manual handling. The wood has a meadow that used to be a cricket pitch which is perfect for our large parachute games. We’ve started to see a lot of young ash trees dying from dieback which we’ve taken down to use for dens/dead hedges. Hopefully this will open the area to natural regeneration of healthy ash (which we leave) or other species such as sycamore. Alas this wood may also have some indirect impacts if the adjoining golf course is built on and surrounded by housing development. In the meantime the golf course has gone wild and locals have reported seeing deer on the course and in the wood.
Each wood has a unique activity such as the meadow at St Benedicts and our giant parachute
We’ve visited schools and helped them achieve their outdoor learning potential
We’ve regularly been to schools to help them develop a forest school area, given advice on tree planting and who to approach (such as the Woodland Trusts Free Trees for Schools). We’ve helped manage sights controlling nuisance upgrowth from nettles, brambles and blackthorn which has put off pupils and staff accessing the forest area, looked at tree safety and assessed the wildlife for learning (creating temporary cordoned off sections for miner bees and ant hills).
We’ve also helped schools overcome barriers to using outdoor areas by leading sessions with staff so they can get experience of the sorts of skills that enable them to access the outdoors confidently and to show how much their pupils get from being outside compared to into the classroom.
Its been a fabulous 8 years journey!
We’ve met so many interesting and wonderful people - kids, families, volunteers, residents out for a walk and just people out enjoying the outdoors.