We kicked off our volunteering day at National Trust Cragside with Leigh and Helen, two of the rangers.

The original planned task was near the house, a few hundred metres from the bunkhouse. However, the rangers changed the task to something a bit bigger.

It's three miles up the road into the site and you can park your cars up there

The GoodGym team all looked at each other with the same thought: who would want to drive 3 miles when you could run? (even though we had literally just come straight from parkrun!)

Turns out that the running route is much more direct than the driving route, just over a mile, some of us even beat the van and the tractor up there.

The task was an epic clearance one. We were massively widening a rocky footpath by cutting back a huge corner full of rhododendron.

Rich had already felled a tree before ranger Helen advised that we could leave the trees in situ, woops!

We filled 5 enormous trailer loads with Katie (who's birthday it was!) and Debs doing an excellent job of carefully packing it all in and separating out woody bits from "leafy stuff that would be good for den-building".

Twiggy bits were unacceptable and were added to a big pile for burning (standby for the bonfire report!)