Say one thing for Bristolian weather, say its fickle.

We ran through all four seasons to meet the lovely folks at Narroways, a rather lovely nature reserve with a cracking view over the city. That view came at the price of being exposed to mother nature's wild ways and we seemed to be battered with wind and soothed with sun in equal measure.

Tej and Ruth had us sawing, hacking and lopping away at a hedge that was obscuring the aforementioned view. We even got to spontaneously practice a little dead hedging! After we expertly restored the view we were off for a well deserved spot of lunch.

It was great to have so many people join us for the first time tonight: welcome to Jenny, Oliver, Mitch, Richard, Jo and Isabel! We got warmed up, marvelled at the fact that 11% of the runners here tonight were called Richard, then split up into our respective groups.

Mel led a walk and chat litter-picking group on a couple of kilometre tour around the local area. It was a well-planned route as, even though right in the centre of town, the group found loads of rubbish and hauled a load of bags to a pick-up point for Bristol Waste. Despite being busy litter-bees, they still had time to take some power stance litter-picking photos. All in a night's work!

The Black Arrows

Meanwhile, the rest of us set off towards St Werburghs, led by our very own acrobatic running crew, The Black Arrows, who stunned us with performances of running in squares, arrows and straight lines. The talent really never ends here at GoodGym Bristol. We soon arrived at our two neighbouring tasks for the evening, St Werburgh's City Farm Community Garden and Narroways. The charities had even had a chinwag before we arrived to work out how many of us each of them needed!

The Tree Musketeers

Seven GoodGymers headed off with Chris from Narroways to the nature reserve to do some cutting back of the overgrown areas. This involved lots of bramble cutting, hacking at long grass and weeds (which Richard got scarily into), cutting back overgrown trees and bushes and trying to remove ash saplings. Chris offered a prize for anyone who could do this (I embarrassed myself having a go and not moving it in the slightest) - top tip, remove your saplings when they are tiny!

Meanwhile the rest of the group were split into seven teams in the Community Gardens. Half of the teams were allocated an area of the gardens to tackle the bindweed which has spread across the whole area during the hot summer. The other teams were set to work to remove a tree which had fallen onto the path, stopping it from being accessible and doing compost heap runs. Liam had a blissful half hour peacefully watering the vegetables and Chris and Richard got the hard job with turning compost at the farm.

Living on barrow-ed time

The time went too quickly and we had to drag people away from their bindweed to run home. The team from the gardens were really pleased what our 'team of locusts' had got done, and we wished them farewell for the last of our light evenings at the gardens this year.

We headed back and did a lunge stop. After 5 minutes and legs beginning to burn, we got the group back together and headed back to Queen Square for a much-needed stretch off.

The weekend of the balloon fiesta saw many folks up early to watch the unfolding spectacle so it was good to see plenty arrive for our group run today. We even had a visitor from Cardiff - nice to have you along today Martin!

With the recent dry conditions, fire starting is definitely not a good option up on Narroways nature reserve but we found a rhyming equivalent up on 'Cutthroat lane' today as we helped repair a fence. We were joining one of the regular workdays run by volunteers up at the reserve and were shown how to staple the new fencing onto the existing wooden posts before reinforcing the midsections by using twisted wire to connect the new fence to the old. With a bit of practice, the quality of these twists improved noticeably over the course of the session - as can be seen in the photograph above!

But fence repair was not our sole occupation today. While one group did a fantastic job of collecting 3 or 4 bags of litter from the bottom of the hill and neighbouring community garden a third group got cracking on some brambles and unwanted ash seedlings further round the hill. Liam in particular seemed to enjoy wielding a rather savage looking billhook - and was certainly give a healthy amount of space to do said wielding by his companions!

A last minute surge of wire twisting and a few helpings of blackberry crumble meant that we began our return a little later than planned so it was a rather hurried dash back to base but there was still time for a quick coffee for anyone heading on to the GG Bristol summer BBQ later.

Our plans had to be changed today as the early morning weather was not conducive to the second task that was planned - overnight and morning rain meant that our stencilling and painting task on the Bristol to Bath Railway Path had to be postponed.

No matter, as we knew that the A-maze-ing Malago Greenway Berry Maze project would be grateful of some extra pairs of hands as they try to get their project finished, so it was great that we had a good turnout today to support two tasks.

It was wonderful to welcome Gillian, the GoodGym Older People Operations Team Leader, who travelled over from London this morning and brought along Alasdair and Tom for their first GG experience and also Oliver, who had come along with Anna, for his first taste of the action too. Hope you all enjoyed doing things in Bristol fashion!

Our main task today was a completely new one organised at Narroways Hill - a little grassy & wooded ridge in the neighbourhood of St Werburghs. When British Rail threatened to sell it to developers in 1997 it caused such a reaction that 800 local people demonstrated to save it, thousands signed petitions & wrote letters and money was raised so it was purchased by Bristol City Council.

Nowadays, the site is looked after by Narroways Millennium Green Trust, the charity set up to administer and manage the site now that it has Millennium Green status. All the work needed to maintain the site and keep it available to be enjoyed by the local community (and wildlife!) is carried out by a small group of volunteers and enthusiasts.

A group of ten of us headed over to Narroways Hill and enjoyed a wonderful and varied task, including:

• Taking a railway sleeper up to Narroways Hill - we needed a few rest breaks for this as it was a particularly heavy sleeper!
• Gathering up Buddleia prunings in Church Field and using them to block a gap in the hedge of the Community Gardens - this looked amazing when it was done.
• A litter pick of the area - lots of trash, but the removal of old tents, cardboard, wooden pallets, plastic piping and the usual bottles and cans, had the place looking much tidier.
• Cutting back Ash seedlings and chopping out some of the brambles to stop these encroaching on the grassy area.

Looking down from the top of the hill, the red shirts looked like a particularly busy set of worker ants determined to get the job done before lunchtime.

Harry and the team of wonderful NMGT members seem delighted with what we managed to achieve and it would be great to be able to go back again soon to help some more - lots to do here in this green and very pleasant bit of land.

It’s a really nice flat run too along the Frome Valley Walkway, through Riverside Park.

Halo? Goodgym here!

Meanwhile over at the Berry Maze the team were hard at work removing the last of the brambles and berried rock so that mulch could be liberally applied to the paths and the way was clear for the berry plants to finally be installed. Tom and Alasdair worked at one of the toughest bramble sections while Davd and Gillian dug up and raked some of the neighbouring patches. Emma showed some particular versatility switching from digging to raking to stone lifting to wheelbarrowing at regular intervals (thanks for letting me have a go at the wheelbarrow, Emma).

All the while, Jack and Caroline offloaded rock and onloaded mulch, with Jack adding an old phone to the unusual finds accrued so far on the project!

Another fantastic Malago morning.

Back at Roll For The Soul, we wished good luck to our runners taking part in the Oxford Half Marathon on Sunday, chatted about the upcoming group runs and missions and congratulated Alex on becoming the latest GoodGym Bristol centurion - hitting 100 good deeds with today’s run. Nice one Alex!