It was a rather feisty westerly wind that was keeping the clouds away today and also blowing us all towards Ham Lands for our monthly visit to help the Friends of Ham Common! Every month we’re bramblein’!

We were tackling a different area of the common today: our mission to create a path through the undergrowth!

Sounds simple? Not when you are greeted by a thorny mountain of brambles and prickly undergrowth. Twists and tangles of barbed brambles and vines needed to be cut so we could break free to get us through to the other side.

We were joined by a great selection of GoodGym faces. We had excellent eager new joiners Dom and Lily on their first ever GG outing, and they quickly embraced the GoodGym spirit and got stuck straight in! We were also joined by some tenacious tourists from across London in the form of Fran, Mike and Jess who brought brilliant energy to the mission, plus some fantastic familiar GoodGym Kingston faces. It was a very merry bunch battling amongst the brambles today!

We divided and conquered with one group tackling the bramble barricade to the main path and the other group helping to widen the inner path.

It’s always amazing how much of a difference can be made when the GoodGym Thornado arrives! While we chatted about the different ways we had all discovered GoodGym, the brambles were quaking in their prickly boots and the path width was doubling in size. The barricade team created a scene akin to that of the channel tunnel engineers, chopping away at the undergrowth until they had their bramble breakthrough! They were through!

As one barricade was taken down another mini one was created to help protect local wildlife from being badgered.

To celebrate our achievement we all proudly headed home out through the new path we had created. It was true, you could now see the wood through the trees!