It was the second parks mission of the weekend with 4 of us doing a double (me, Andrew, Miranda and Tom who is pushing to get to 50 good deeds!). There were two main tasks: fixing the broken fences which go around the park and chopping down all but the biggest trees in a section of the park which gathered rubbish and dog poo.

We split into two groups with me and Liz being the fence fixing crew. There were five sections of fence where either the top or middle plank of wood, or both, were missing. We used a crowbar to put out old nails, with varying success! I managed to snap the head of a few of the nails which meant Liz had to plier them out! We measured the new wood and sawed it to the right length. Then hammered the new nails in to keep the wood and the metal plates in place, a few of the nails ended up a bit crooked due to some off-centre hammering but all nails were successfully hammered in it the end.

Meanwhile Andrew, Miranda, Sam and Tom started hacking down bushes to clear the overgrown area using the saws and loppers. Once cut they pulled the branches into the nearby bushes.

We had a visitor to goodgym, Angel, a student who was interested in the good work we are doing in the community. She videoed us hard at work and interviews some people of what they got out of goodgym. We were laughing at the amount of times both Newcastle goodgym and Harbottle park have been filmed!

We had our usually tea and coffee break half way through, along with a nice discussion about different wildlife people had seen kingfishers, foxes and otters but a distinct lack of red squirrels. Park ranger Mike asked if we wanted to swap jobs, but everyone was adamant they wanted to finish the job they had started and got back to work.

By 12 o’clock the fence around the park was 100% intact and bushy area was 100% cleared just as the sun came out – success!