by Skibbereen Tidy Towns
A few months have passed since Skibbereen was awarded a fourth bronze medal at the national SuperValu Tidy Towns competition, celebrating its 60th birthday. A breakdown of the marks and adjudicator’s report is available here.
Since then autumn has turned to winter and there has been a lot of work done around Skibbereen in that time.
October was a busy month and while our Tuesday work evenings had ended we were able to do some project work on Saturday mornings with the first one being a spring clean of our polytunnel in readiness for the season ahead.
We were awarded official adoption of Tragumna beach by Clean Coasts, the newest of 605 registered groups around the Irish coastline. Beach cleans are the obvious responsibility but there are others. Feel free to read more here. If you happen to be visiting Tragumna for a walk over the Christmas period please consider a #2minutebeachclean of the beach itself or surrounding area.
A number of Saturday mornings across October and November were spent clearing the North Street car park riverside area of overgrowth. This major project for the group is drawing to a close and we look forward to the planting of 9 whitebeam trees very soon. Whitebeam is a native Irish tree most common in the south of the country. For more information please see the website of the Tree Council of Ireland.
Also during October we were delighted to promote the Refill Ireland campaign to encourage local cafes to provide free water refills to people bringing their own bottles. Both Apple Betty’s and O’Neill Coffee proudly display the sticker and we are sure that other businesses will follow and help put Skibbereen on the Tap Map.
In November we turned our attention to planting winter bedding and spring bulbs in numerous locations. In Mill Road we were able to save a variety of seeds from the spent summer planting around the Spearline silver birch trees. These are currently being dried out in the tunnel and we are delighted that the boys of St. Patrick’s Boys School have kindly offered to sow some trays for us after the Christmas holidays.
The adjudicator’s report recommended an audit of the litter bins in the town. We undertook this exercise at the beginning of November and submitted our recommendations to Cork County Council for consideration. We haven’t heard back yet but will follow up in the early part of 2019.
Litter is an ongoing problem for all towns and since October we have been using OpenLitterMap to tag the locations of litter identified for targeted litter picks. Tagging litter is one thing but of course we followed up and on a Saturday morning in November we completed a litter pick along two roads leading from the community school. In all, two volunteers picked four large green bags full of litter in just two hours. The most unusual item was a brake pad from a car – honestly!
Following our blog post on the topic of dog poop, two of our volunteers visited the senior classes of St. Joseph’s Girls School and chatted with the girls about the work of Tidy Towns generally and the hazards of dog 💩 in particular. Following this, many of the girls entered the competition to design a poster or research a project on the topic. The entries were of an incredibly high standard and it was really difficult to choose a winner from each class. In the end we had to select one entry from each of 3rd, 4th, 5th and 6th classes but gave everyone a badge for entering.
December weather really hasn’t been kind for outdoor work but overall we’re very pleased with the project work we managed to complete over the last few months.
At this stage all that is left for us to do is to wish our volunteers and supporters a very happy Christmas and we look forward to another successful year in 2019. Nollaig Shona agus mianta is fearr don bhliain atá romhainn.
For regular updates please subscribe to this newsletter and follow us on Facebook or Twitter.
If you are interested in becoming involved with Skibbereen Tidy Towns please contact us at 087-6220132 or by email at skibbereentidytowns@icloud.com.
Featured image courtesy of Pixabay
Skibbereen Tidy Towns 