Youth Leadership Group 3 day Site Visit August 2021: Day 2

On the second day of their visit to Wild Garsdale Pike our YLG spent the day meeing experts.

Our first expert was Douglas Mitcham, Community Heritage Officer at the YDNP, he accompanied us all round the land, on an atmospherically misty and wild day, describing and explaining the major archaeological and historical features. These included the late Neolithic ring cairn ….

And the more ‘modern’ Old Man of Garsdale Cairn ……

And finally one of our sheepfolds – where we spent some time discussing how this could be restored and repurposed as a meeting place …..

After lunch on the way down the hill we met our next expert Sammy Haddock, an Animal Conservation student at Cumbria Uni who is currently on placement with the BOOM project. Sammy introduced the group to survey techniques and we had some fun throwing quadrats around!

Last but not least we met Pete Leason and Steve from the Woodland Trust, who led a really interetesting and informative about what we could do to increase the tree cover on the land, talked about different native species and the importance of ‘right tree right place’ ……

That was a long, but really useful, imformative day – lots of food for thought and our YLG got all the way round the land for the first time!!