Shooters Hill Woodlands Working Party
- Friends of Oxleas Woodlands 3
- 6 days ago
- 2 min read
Saturday 11 October 2025
Oxleas Wood
What a difference a week makes! This Saturday was cool and dry and, importantly, safe to work. The Shooter's Hill Woodlands Working Party, ably assisted by one of our local park rangers, met up at the cafe and wandered down Coulthurst's ride to the green chain finger post.
The group split up; one crew of 8 carried on down to Welling way to work around the big pond, while the other crew stayed in the woods and got going on preparatory work for this year's coppicing.
The pond we were working on is one that had been increased in size by Froglife last December - it still has water despite the dry weather. The vegetation around the pond was cut so that leaf fall into it is reduced and the pond does not begin to silt up again. Small logs were also pulled out. And all done without anyone falling in!
Back up in the woods, there's still a lot of bramble and honeysuckle in the coppicing work area. 15 of us spent the morning reducing that a bit. We do this partly so that we can work on the hazel over winter without snagging ourselves too badly. Mostly, though, it's so that other plants get some breathing room. After the coppice is cut there will be a lot more light at ground level for other plants to use, and we'd like that not to benefit only brambles. We could remove the bramble as we go, but it's too tempting to skip that in favour of working on another tree, and somehow forget to come back and finish up later.
We did take out a small number of hollies. Holly is an over competitive species in our conditions and will take over given the chance. Because we want to reduce its health (not improve it), we're happy to take it down before autumn dormancy really kicks in.
We moved waste material into the nearest dead hedge - sadly this was not actually that close, so some heaps were left at the edge of the work area to use up another time.
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