We’ve continued to be busy at Piles and several months have passed since we found a moment to write a blog post.

So here’s the bit of wall repaired in July. The grass has now grown along the top, but for some reason walkers are using it as a path, so we’ll need to put something there to stop that happening. It hasn’t been damaged yet, but it will be eventually if people keep using it.

We’ve also repaired another sizeable section of wall, plus some smaller collapses, near the downstream end of the copse. This is near the ford that is sometimes used for watering by cattle on Stall Moor, which them come across the river and into the copse. This work makes the copse cattle-proof from the west. That said, there haven’t been cattle on the adjacent part of Stall Moor for some years, but that could change any time.

Here are before, during and after pictures of this section. We seeded grass on the backfill and on the disturbed ground in front, and that has germinated and is now growing.

As explained in March, we have embarked on a campaign to restore the areas of the wood damaged by fires and associated damage. We have now made some progress in repairing the walls using the rocks removed from them to make fireplaces. We have also cleaned out and reseeded a number of fireplaces, using a moorland grass mix provided by the DNPA Ranger.

Here’s a general view of one area roped off for restoration, and the rebuilt wall near it.

And here’s another site. It’s a bit difficult to see with the dappled sunlight, but the grass is growing quite well despite the lack of rain.

A few days after Christmas, we went up to Piles to blow away the cobwebs and start looking at what we’re going to work on in 2018. Now that the boundary wall has been made complete again, meaning that we can control when Higher Piles is grazed, we’re also thinking about which areas of Higher Piles need to be protected completely from grazing. We walked up and down the southern end of Higher Piles looking for sphagnum moss. Sphagnum mosses are found in wet flushes (spring lines) in parts of the moor, with their own high botanic interest.  Cattle and sheep crowd round them in dry weather, so the mosses get badly damaged and rushes come in instead.  To stop this happening, we are thinking of fencing around some of the flushes in the southern part of Higher Piles.  So we did some marking and measuring to see how much fencing would be needed to do something worthwhile.  There was a lot more than we thought, though the sphagnum is dominated by grasses in many places.  There used to be huge amounts of sphagnum at Piles. The family used to collect it during the second world war for use in dressings.

As you can see, it was quite a blustery day…