Skibbereen Tidy Towns

by Skibbereen Tidy Towns

It has been unseasonably mild this winter and indeed, although it’s not yet the end of February, spring has certainly sprung. That’s not to say that the threat of frost and snow has passed, since March is typically known as the month of ‘many weathers‘ and isn’t there a saying that goes something like ‘in like a lion, out like a lamb‘? Nevertheless, these couple of months have been excellent for Saturday morning events and here’s a look back at what has been accomplished thanks to a dedicated bunch of volunteers.

On 22 December we were lucky enough to be able to complete the North Street riverside rejuvenation project with the planting of the native Irish whitebeam trees under the expert guidance of Michael Burke. The following Saturday, still in December, one of our volunteers undertook a major alcohol litter pick of a blackspot along Chapel Lane.

January started with another Saturday morning litter pick that took three of our volunteers through the Main Street car park, across the road, and along the river walk to Bridge Street. The resulting collection was quite a sight for sore eyes, have a look for yourself.

Saturday, 12 January, was a much nicer event with 12 volunteers engaged for a couple of hours weeding the sloped bank at the top of Mardyke and planning a bug hotel for our adopted pollinator plot courtesy of Cork County Council. We haven’t actually built the bug hotel yet but we have all the materials and it’s on our growing spring list if anyone is interested in helping with it.

Some of our volunteers have been lucky enough to assist with apple tree planting at various locations across the town as part of the Appletown project, the brainchild of the above mentioned Michael Burke, watch out for more on the Appletown story very soon.

In February, we continued a series of ‘weed & sweep’ events along the approach roads to the town, covering quite some distance along the Schull road, Mill (Hospital) road and most recently, the Gortnaclohy bypass road. This initiative involves clearing the kerbsides of grass and weed growth eliminating the requirement for weedkiller spraying by Cork County Council. Of course, this involves considerable amounts of manual effort by volunteers during the growing season and we are very interested in natural alternatives to weedkiller, so watch this space.

The riverside walk along by Inse Alainn, Newbridge Park and Riverdale makes up part of the Abbey Loop walk and we spent a couple of pleasurable Saturday mornings cutting back briar growth and general maintenance including litter picking. The highlight for some of us was the use of this ‘mean machine’ courtesy of Skibbereen Tool Hire, pictured below to edge the pathways.

Finally, for now at least, we arranged for hedge cutting along the main approach roads into Skibbereen for two days in February just ahead of the bird nesting season – phew! The work of Tidy Towns is certainly #NotJustLitterPicks ☑️

We cannot close this blog post without offering our thanks to the sitting councillors from the West Cork municipal district who responded favourably to ours and Bantry Tidy Towns’ request to support Councillor Danny Collins’ motion to refrain from displaying election posters within the 50km speed zones of all West Cork towns and villages. We are delighted to report that the councillors had ‘a good debate on the motion‘ to quote Cllr. Declan Hurley and we trust that all political party and independent candidates for the upcoming local and European elections will follow this lead. For more information on how to support the #PosterFree #PassOnPlastic nationwide environmental campaign please follow this link.

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

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