Estate Maintenance
Estate Maintenance consists of a variety of construction tasks, such as fencing, hedging, and the construction of gates, stiles, water-troughs, and other features.
Access Features: Gates and stiles
Grazing is absolutely necessary to maintain the site's biodiversity. This presence of livestock consequently requires lots of stockproof fences. As it is important that fences do not deter people from enjoying a walk on the hill, a considerable number of gates, stiles and other access points have been installed.
A page with images can be found at Access Features Page.
Other / Water troughs
With the extended grazing that has been introduced since the late 1990's,
there has been an increased need for water troughs. Cattle are often limited to particular fenced-in areas of the hill, and must at all times have access to fresh water. This has meant the laying of water pipes along with other tasks.
Litter picking
Sadly, a consequence of being close to an urban area and having car-parks with fast-food vans overlooking the site, a lot of litter is often found - from sweet wrappers to burned-out cars.
This is both unsightly and harmful to the ecology, so we try to keep the site litter-free, with continual picking during task days, as well as some volunteers devoting days to litter-picking.
There are plenty of images of litter on my litter-picking page, and trashed cars also have a page of their own.
Hedge Planting
While much of the time on Portsdown is spent clearing unwelcome invasive scrub, we also want fence-protection.
'Prickly bushes' like hawthorn is ideal for this, so we spend time uprooting unwanted hawthorn bushes from grassland where they are not wanted, then replanting them along fence-lines on the site border, to give added protection to the site.
Hedge Laying
Although many kilometers of fencing is the only practical way to enclose and delineate the compartments for cattle grazing, we have recently began some hedging.
Hedges form traditional grazing boundaries, with the advantage of providing a variety of habitats for wildlife, both animal and plant.
