Fantastic VINE Celebration event at Long Wood!
Written by Tir Coed / Tuesday 27 September 2016
Tir Coed celebrated the achievements of the VINE project at Long Wood Community Woodland near Lampeter on Saturday 24th September. The last 3 years in Long Wood have meant that many people in the local community have discovered this special local wood and enjoyed a wide variety of training courses, activity days and open days.
There have been 6 training courses, which each run over a 3 month period and are accredited through Agored Cymru. 44 people have attended these courses and out of these, 30 of them have achieved accreditation. There have been 74 activity days with 1025 people attending them. And 9 open days engaging with around 100 people per event. Throughout all these sessions, we have been lucky enough to be able to contract in freelance tutors, and over the 3 years there have been 37 individual tutors employed to deliver courses and activities to the participants.
At the celebration event on Saturday, Rob Smith and Eifion Wakefield ran the very popular green woodcraft activities, including making a bench and spatulas that people could make themselves and who were very proud of their work. And James Kendall and Lea Wakeman ran a variety of fun activities for children and families. So there was something for everyone!
The actual celebration involved storytelling by the magical Hayley, music and songs from James and Iain, the talented singer songwriter Abby, a special harvest apple cake shared with everyone, and a presentation to Carolyn from Long Wood Community Woodland, of the final ecological survey report carried out by Scott Roe from Vital Ecology, where local people had the opportunity to get involved over the 3 years and with recommendations of improving this special woodland for wildlife for the future.
About 150 attended the Tir Coed event which was part of the big Long Wood Forest Fair. Many thanks go to all the tutors, volunteers, other Tir Coed staff and everyone who visited us.
We hope you enjoyed yourselves, I certainly did! - Linda Bradshaw-Wood
