Celebration Issue: Sun 24th March 2024
Thanks to our lovely full subscribers, we've finally become a sustainable social enterprise! This, & several other reasons, make this publication very happy today.
Morning. Today’s a day to celebrate!
Firstly: Jasmin Paris, who grew up 20 miles away and started her running career in the Peak District, has just become the first woman ever to complete the Barkley Marathons, an infamous ultrarun through forests of thorns, and up and down a series of horrible hills in Frozen Head State Park in Tennessee. Runners try to navigate five laps of a roughly 20 mile course (that changes every year) within 60 hours. After 15 events, with 35 runners each time, only 20 people have ever completed the course, including now the Peak District’s Jasmin Paris, who ran in to the famous checkpoint gate just 1 minute 39 seconds before the 60 hour deadline.
The amazing photograph (above) of Paris after her finish is by photojournalist Jacob Zocherman, and has featured around the world. I meekly asked if we could see it here, despite our lack of budget (as yet) and he replied: “Go for it. Big commercial actor needs to pay up, but your initiative is better.” Thanks Jacob!
Secondly: As first reported here in January, news that the little-known but fabulous Shire Brook Valley is to receive £1.3 million from the government to help enhance the area for wildlife is now official. The work, though the Species Survival Fund, will include the Shire Brook Valley Nature Reserve, Silkstone Ravine and parts of Beighton and Woodhouse, and will improve the chances for rare creatures including Harvest Mice, Willow Tits and Great Crested Newts, along with other fabulous beasts like dragonflies, lizards, Barn Owls, Kingfishers and maybe even Marsh Harriers.
I hear years of toil by several amazing voluntary groups in the area helped clinch the funding, along with work already carried out by the city council’s ecology team with the Froglife charity to build a series of around 40 ponds between Woodhouse Washlands and Holbrook Marsh to improve the breeding chances of Great Crested Newts and other amphibians. I’ll have a full feature on all this soon.
Thirdly: News just in that South Yorkshire is to receive a new grant of nearly £5 million from Active Travel England for walking and cycling routes, and initiatives to increase active travel in the area. Active Travel Commissioner for South Yorkshire Ed Clancy told me the government agency has awarded around 85% of what South Yorkshire Combined Authority had asked for this spring, as opposed to a tiny fraction in last year’s bids.
We have the money this time, he said, because Active Travel England can see South Yorkshire is setting up a pipeline of schemes and can see “political will”. The funding in Sheffield will see new walking and wheeling infrastructure around Burngreave, along with cycle training and cycle hire projects, including a new e-bike hire scheme run by the South Yorkshire combined authority. I’ll have more on this in the next Round at Bill’s Mother’s for full members.
And Finally, It’s Looking A Bit Black Over Bill’s Mother’s now has 200 full subscribers willing to stump up less than the cost of a shrinkflated six five pack of creme eggs per month to support a sustainable out there magazine for the Outdoor City.
So we (meaning all you wonderful paying members, your employee, and the publication you’re all reading) are now an official social enterprise:
Working for the good of local people and nature and biodiversity and public health and all that ✅
Business aims as above rather than just ratcheting up the profits ✅
Paying employees a living wage or above - just about! ✅
Also, like the wonderful Sheffield Tribune, I hope we’re doing something real and tangible to help keep local journalism alive. What’s next? Well, I will keep asking the free subscribers who’ve been here for a month or two if they can contribute to our social enterprise too.
And practically, when we get to 250 paying subscribers I can put at least two days a week in rather than the current and very notional 10 hours (I actually do rather a lot more, but you’re worth it), so we’ll have more longer features, contributions from other writers, and more news in our Round at Bill’s Mother’s edition. Hopefully you’ll see a bit more of this very soon, as I revise our listings and news update services.
So, thank you all for getting us to this point. All being well, it’ll get bigger and better from here. So remember: F.F.S! Forward to Friends and Subscribe!
Spring Flowers
Now’s the time for vernal flora, says Professor Ian Rotherham, on one of my recent trips with the ecologist and woodland expert to learn about the life and history of the woods in our city of trees.
We’re with around a dozen fellow explorers of the Digging Deeper for All and Climate Resilience projects in Graves Park.
Vernal flora is another name for the early spring flowers that lie ready and waiting to spring up when temperatures rise, but before the tree canopy begins to close out the light above them. (It’s where we get the word Spring from, the season when trees sprout and flowers spring out of the ground).
If you’re monitoring woodland flora, you need to survey a wood at least three times in a year for the various waves of plantlife: today in Graves Park we’re looking at the first wave, next will be May and June when the bluebells flower before the tree canopy closes, and then there are the shadier plants of July and August.
As we scout out the woodland floor, Ian talks about how you can read a woodland and its flora like pages in a book, to understand its heritage. Scattered around are indicators of the ancient woodlands that graced the land of Graves Park in late medieval times, along with more recent additions from the grand country park that attracted visitors from across the north 200 years ago.
A wood changes over time, thanks to human interference and natural opportunism. Here’s a dead tree with scores of beetle holes: Ian digs out a handful of crumbly brown ‘beetle poo’ as he puts it, where the larvae of perhaps Lesser Stag or Rhinoceros Beetles have defecated chewed up wood which, together with beetle loving fungi, will slowly return the tree to the woodland floor.
Here’s a newer woodland, where Bluebells are spreading two metres every year by throwing their seed ahed of them in the summer. And here are patches of gaudy spring Daffodils, planted over waves of woodland management, whilst hidden away, the much smaller Wild Daffodil is another ancient woodland indicator.
Woodlands are full of history as well as wildlife, says Ian, and later in the week we visited another wood where he’s found that agencies who should know better are damaging our woodland history for ever.
I’ll have more on that, and those early spring flowers, in posts for full members and free triallists soon. But for now, why not get out and find what’s springing up in your woodlands?
Getting It Done
I’m not sure how much South Yorkshire Mayor Oliver Coppard enjoyed his first trip on a Brompton bicycle, even though the titanium model he’d bagged (ahead of his rival rider, Olympian Ed Clancy) was partly forged in Sheffield.
“I’ve cycled along cobbles before, but not on a Brompton,” he said, facing the hostile cobbled climb towards Park Hill flats from the race start line, yards away from the now publicly owned Supertram network above the station.
The race was part of the Urban CX series, raising money for the Roundabout and Work Ltd charities in the city. Clancy had managed a wheelie over the finish line on his practice run, but both he and Coppard were struggling with the ‘fold and unfold a Brompton in record time’ aspect of the event, a key component of Brompton races across the world.
Clancy stormed up the cobbles in his two person heat, but was then beaten at the final moment by his quick folding opponent. Whereas in Coppard’s heat, his co-racer was halfway up the hill before the Mayor got his bike unfolded in order to get going, and in his haste, neglected to select an appropriate gear.
Nevertheless, the Mayor pounded the tiny wheels upwards without faltering and crossed the finish line to applause from all parties. How do you feel, asked the nearby correspondent. “Breathless,” he panted.
Given the adrenaline in play, I felt this was a good time to ask the key question on patient cyclists minds now we own our Supertram, a question they’ve been asking for thirty years. “When will the Supertram carry bicycles?”
“As soon as I can work out how to get that done,” said the Mayor. There’s a consultation (here) and there needs to be consideration of all tram users, he said, noting that many other tram networks (and trains) do carry bikes without problem.
“If they can solve it, we can solve it,” he said, before attempting to fold up his loaned titanium Brompton. At present, folding bikes can be carried on trams, but ordinary bikes cannot.
Organiser of Urban CX Adam Simmonite thanked the half dozen volunteers who’d helped put on the event for around 50 riders, aged from 6 to 60, and said he aims for the Park Hill Urban CX to become an established annual event for local and visiting cyclists. Hopefully, next year, they’ll be able to arrive by tram, even if they don’t own a Sheffield-made Brompton.
Selected What’s On Out There (from Sun 24th March)
This is a small sample for this week taken from our full regularly updated listings service currently available in Round at Bill’s Mother’s. If you’re in a group who put on outdoor events and want me to include them, please stick them in the comments below as follows: Date, What it is, Online link.
Sun 24th - Parkwood Springs parkrun preview run (1 or 2 laps -11am)
Sun 24th - Sheffield Conservation Volunteers work day at Wadsley & Loxley Common
Tues 26th - Plant Swap at the Botanical Gardens (£3)
Weds 27th - SRWT Volunteer Work Day - Sunnybank
Weds 27th - Whirlowbrook Park volunteer pond clearing day
Thurs 29th - Finding Lost Norton Park at Graves Park - Reminiscences & Local History in and around Graves Park (Norton Hotel, with historian Christine Handley)
Sat 30th - Easter egg trail at Whirlowbrook Park
A final celebratory story: voluntary tree warden (and reader) Nicola Gilbert tells me to expect the top of Banner Cross to soon become what she calls Banner Cross Boulevard, after her determined work to agree a tree planting scheme with the council and local traders. She won a New Horizon elm tree thanks to her tree warden work, and Amey has now agreed to plant another eight trees alongside it, probably within weeks. More on this in Round at Bill’s Mother’s soon.
And thanks once more to ace photographer Jacob Zocherman, who emailed me again about Jasmin Paris this morning: “She is such an incredible person. I will remember that moment she reached (the finish) for the rest of my life.”
Thanks for reading. Hope you enjoyed our happy days edition. For more of this kind of thing, see the button below.
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Congratulations David!
It’s looking a bit black over Bill’s mother’s is brilliant. Thoroughly recommend it to anyone who’s interested in nature and how she’s manifesting in our locality.
After getting hooked on Jennie’s Spine Race and knowing Jasmin was her hero, I followed this crazy race! What a result and what a photo! Says it all.