Fingle Woods volunteers

[Eleanor Lewis, community engagement officer, Fingle Woods] 
Fingle Woods is an ancient woodland restoration project. It is a partnership between the National Trust and the Woodland Trust and it's the first kind of partnership of its kind. The whole kind of point of the partnership really is drawing on the strengths of the two different organisations. 

[Mark Brown, programme funding lead] 
So, we identified an acquisition at Fingle Woods back in 2013. It was the site that we identified as being in urgent need of restoration and realised that the National Trust would be an ideal partner to work with. 

The Woodland Trust and the National Trust agreed to jointly fundraise for Fingle Woods. One of the key components of that fundraising and that's made all the work at Fingle Woods happen, has been the work funded through the Heritage Lottery Fund and through national lottery players. 

[Julia and Julia, volunteers at Fingle Woods] 
I've been volunteering here at Fingle for about four-and-a-half years... and I'm a relative newbie, so I've been involved for about a year-and-a-half since I moved to the area two years ago, and it's been a fantastic way to get to know different people, to find out more about the woods and everything that's going on locally. 

[Jim White, volunteer leader] 
The best thing about working with volunteers is the volunteers themselves. They're such a great bunch of people and come from all walks of life and it's just a delightful experience working with them. 

[Eleanor] 
Volunteers at Fingle are involved in all aspects of the project. We have a Woodland Trust kind of working party. We then have a whole suite of volunteers who do monitoring. We saw this morning the ancient-boundary volunteers, so they are mapping all of Fingle’s ancient boundaries; and then we’ve got volunteers monitoring water quality, so they are looking at the effects our ancient woodland restoration is having upon the water; and they do so many other things as well. There’s a whole kind of plethora of tasks they do.  

The jobs they’re involved with, the hours they contribute and the skills they bring never cease to amaze me.