West Stormont Woodland Group

West Stormont
Woodland Group

Scottish Charitable Incorporated Organisation (SCIO) SC051682

Join us today to bring Taymount Wood and Five Mile Wood into community ownership

Community Monthly Update – September 2021

More litter-picking required at Taymount Wood car park this month. And in the nettles and ditches too. It would be so nice if it stopped, wouldn't it?

Thankfully, very little litter gets dropped in the woods themselves, which is great. Did you know that Keep Scotland Beautiful have now launched their “Upstream Battle” campaign on the River Tay catchment? As 80% of marine litter comes from land, where litter is washed into gutters, blown into streams and in our case, flushed into the Tay and swept down to the North Sea, we really need to address this problem all over. WSWG will aim to help as much as we can with this campaign.

What has WSWG been doing this month?

  • Completing the Shadow Board’s programme of site visits to fine-tune our woodland management plans for inclusion in our Business Plan going forward. Ongoing on-line meetings of the WSWG Shadow Board too, working together to bring our final plans together for you in the next few months.
  • Margaret Lear’s lovely blog took us through the pros and cons in being “Becalmed in Five Mile Wood” “just the opportunity to get close to flowers, fruits and seeds, to admire their detail and mutable colours, and then to take photographs, but glad of a breeze to keep the summer flies at bay.”  Find the full blog on our website!
  • Gathering more fascinating local history on both woods from several WSWG members – the ancient road through Five Mile Wood and the “Newfie Camp” in Taymount Wood. So many stories to be told through our project.
  • Our final Info Walk of the summer on 15 August in Five Mile Wood again brought pleasant weather, great chat and lots of useful advice for WSWG to take on board across a range of topics as we strolled through the wood.
  • Thank you to Stanley Store for hosting a small stock of houseplants grown in peat free compost to raise funds for WSWG. Thank you to anyone who made a donation to this little venture. Every penny counts, so we may try this again.

… oh no, more in the nettles
All cleaned up again

Word of the Month

Newfie camp: Overseas supplies of raw timber became severely restricted during World War II, as the German Navy attempted to isolate the British Isles by disrupting the convoys bringing essential supplies by sea, forcing the country to try and satisfy demands for material such as timber from local resources. However, this problem was not restricted only to material resources at that time, as labour was also in short supply, since most of the men had been conscripted into the Armed Forces. This shortfall in labour was addressed in part by calling on overseas assistance from Canada, and locally, by the creation of the lumberjills, female volunteers recruited to work in forestry. The Newfoundland Overseas Forestry Unit (NOFU) was active between 1939 and 1945. There were 71 loggers’ camps set up across Britain, and one of these, Camp 53, was located by Taymount Wood from 1940-41 and known locally as “the Newfie Camp”. Source: www.secretscotland.org.uk

What’s coming up next?

  • We would love to find out more about the Newfie Camp at Taymount Wood as part of the second world war effort, so we’d be delighted if you have anything more you can tell us about this interesting piece of local history.
  • WSWG is extremely pleased to have been invited to attend the meeting of the new Perthshire Nature Connections Partnership (PNCP) on 29 September. PNCP encompasses a long-term, nature-based vision for Perth and Kinross that aims to create a distinct connection between the Cairngorms and Loch Lomond & The Trossachs National Parks. PNCP facilitates connections and identifies possible actions to help land managers, communities and businesses bridge the gaps, engage one another, better support nature, mitigate climate change and carbon sequestration, and restore ecosystems. As WSWG and West Stormont Connect aim to do locally too.

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Previous Articles

Community Monthly Update – November 2023

We are really thrilled to let you know that Forestry and Land Scotland (FLS) has approved WSWG’s Revised Wildwood Proposal and Business Plan for Taymount Wood. This is the first big goal achieved in our Community Asset Transfer Process to bring Taymount and Five Mile Woods into community ownership!

Read More »

Community Monthly Update – October 2023

A highlight for the WSWG Project this month has been the timely teaming up of a group of employees from Aviva in Perth with some unexpectedly lovely autumn weather for a day of corporate volunteering. On 2 October, five enthusiastic Aviva colleagues spent the day with WSWG in the middle of Taymount Wood on a range of interesting and very useful tasks, quite a contrast to their usual office based working environment.

Read More »

Community Monthly Update – September 2023

Given the distinctly seasonal change in the weather of late, we thought we would bring our Word of the Month up to the top of our September update. Psithurism: (Noun) The sound of wind in the trees and rustling of leaves, from “psithuros”, the Greek word for whispering. Enjoy your woods this autumn!

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Community Monthly Update – August 2023

This month we really want to share with you a wonderful event we had – the joint woodland picnic on 22 July with Tayside Woodland Partnerships (TWP). We pitched our gazebos in a lovely grassy glade in Taymount Wood and set out a delicious picnic spread courtesy of Alison’s Kitchen in Blairgowrie – quiches, sausage rolls and cakes galore – on portable tables kindly lent to us by Stanley Village Hall. More food and home-baking was brought by the picnickers themselves. Despite weather forecasts to the contrary, it was a beautiful day with not a drop of rain or drizzle. After lots of great chat and good food, we heard a little about each of our organisations’ respective projects and then took a walk up the main track to King’s Myre Loch.

Read More »

Community Monthly Update – July 2023

First up this month is for us to say a big thank you to a lovely group of young people from Ochil Tower School in Auchterarder who had come on a mini-bus trip to visit Taymount Wood on 21 June … and just did a litter-pick whilst they were there!! What a great example of being good citizens – enjoying the environment and taking care of it together.

Read More »

Community Monthly Update – June 2023

We want to start with a big thank you to all WSWG volunteers who helped in the Wildflower and Mining Bee Rescue Mission this spring. Many times more wildflowers have come through along the various stretches of raked verge than would have been the case had they remained swamped by gorse mulch and, as seen in the photo here, mining bees have successfully emerged where the track surfaces were cleared to help them out too. And of course the cleared sections of track make for more comfortable going again for walkers and dogs. Lots more areas still need attention, and we will keep doing what we can when we can, but thank you again to everyone who helped make a difference for nature this spring.

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