🦫 The vole wide world 🌍

🥵 18 GoodGymmers met on a pleasant (if a tad humid) Monday evening for our group run. The threat of rain may have lurked, courtesy of some rather grey clouds, but thankfully held off until we were in the pub.

🏔️ We had some folk “fresh” from Race the Train and Abraham’s Tea Round at the weekend - incredibly impressive 💪

📠 In honour of National Senior Citizens’ Day, we named, numbered and warmed up while discussing inspirational senior citizens. From Judi Dench to Bruce Springsteen via David Attenborough, the Queen and some of our own, there was a great selection.

✌️ We were helping our friends at St Nick’s in two places this evening. A smaller (but perfectly formed) crew headed back to the Fishergate Triangle to continue our joint project with St Nick’s there.

🌱 The team worked hard but there’s still more to do so look out for more opportunities to continue this work!

🦫 Meanwhile, the rest of us headed to another joint project with St Nick’s, helping attract water voles back to Hull Road Park. Maria explained that by building up the new bank, we’ll be linking habitats along the stream. Once the bank is built, it’ll be planted so the water voles have access to vegetation during the winter when they prefer to stay in their bank burrows. It might take a while but we’ve all got our fingers crossed that the hard work will pay off and we’ll be keeping an eye out for those water voles in years to come (and attempting to distinguish them from rats) 🐀

😴 Anyway, Max declined the conventional walking/running with the equipment from St Nick’s to the park, instead volunteering Steve Rice to give him a lift in his wheelbarrow. Steve put in an incredibly impressive shift, and took Max all the way to the bridge next to the earth piles that need shifting 💪

⛏️ We noticed that Jonathan from St Nick’s had sneakily added a second pile to the one we were hoping to finish tonight. Ed took the mattock and cracked on uncovering the original pile to make it more diggable. Meanwhile, some people cracked on with the new pile.

🏋️ Abigail resumed her raking role from last time we were there, with Maria from St Nick’s, after some agile fence-jumping. Martin and Lucy took the role of barrow-lifters while the rest of the team split their time between digging and barrowing.

👋 Far too soon, it was time to finish and run back to base, to head on to the pub and/or home.