GoodGym Barnsley x Earth hour - running amuck

After a last minute cancellation from our planned painting task, we headed out into the darkness on what turned out to be a rather chilly evening, to do some plogging on the Trans Pennine trail. We were an awesome foursome tonight, joined by Steeley Jason, Steel-city James and steel coming back for more Rachael!

The Trans Pennine Trail is a long-distance path running from coast to coast across Northern England entirely on surfaced paths and using only gentle gradients. The trail is administered from a central office in our very own town of Barnsley, which is responsible for promotion and allocation of funding. However, the twenty-seven local authorities whose areas the trail runs through are responsible for management of the trail within their boundaries and most of the upkeep is done locally by volunteers, who often adopt a small section.

After recent talks with one of Barnsley's rights of way officers, who is responsible for managing the up keep of the trail, it has been decided that GoodGym Barnsley will adopt a section of the trail that is currently not looked after by anyone else. The council do the bigger jobs like cutting back large trees, bushes and edging the paths but the rest is usually left for volunteers to do if they wish. The section running from Barnsley town centre out for a mile towards Stairfoot is the section we plan to look after, so tonight we kicked off by litter picking an area right at the start!

It was really fitting to do an environmentally friendly task tonight, as it fits in perfectly with the WWF Earth Hour campaign, taking place on Saturday 30th March, as well as The Great British Spring Clean month from 22nd March - 23rd April.

We started at the beginning of the trail (by the grubby sign that we plan to clean!), picking up lots of random litter, some of the oddities included men's boxer shorts, half of a pink ukulele and some very stinky boxes!

Once we'd finished a large section of the trail close to Oakwell lane, we changed up our run back to a power-walk back, with some good chat along the way!

Next week we will be joined by the Mayor of Barnsley - to find out more and sign up, click here - please tell your friends and family about it, it'd be great to have a big crowd long for the evening!