Path edging at Sydenham Hill Woods

I'm Jamie, one of the KIW trainees at the London Wildlife Trust. During a practical work day at Sydenham Hill Woods we learnt about one of the negative impacts of increased footfall during the pandemic - the trampling of ground vegitation. While new visitors are always encouraged to vist their local nature reserves, people had started wandering off the usual paths onto vegitation - effectively widening the path and destroying large portions of the ground vegetation. Therefore, to try and help encourage visitors stick to the path while allowing the ground vegetation to recover, we installed some new path edging to highlight the path boundary. To do this we used suitably shaped logs recovered from fallen trees, along with hand made stakes to keep them in place made from the branches from other fallen trees (using an axe to do so). This was done with the help of some fantastic volunteers!