Black Canon Collective

Category: News

  • Dig Day Update

    Not long until our first BCC dig day (Sat 14th June) and things are starting to fall into place; we’ve got the rigger gloves, permanent signs and a litter picking kit on order. Maria and Helen have been talking scram and have come up with a selection of home made cakes, sandwiches and pasties that should keep all of us content; the latest line up is chocolate brownies, banana cakes, Cornish pasties and cheese and pickle/BLT rolls. Lush.

    I spoke to Rodney Garton today and have arranged the delivery of the fence posts and barbed wire to fence off the derelict building at the bottom of the Allotment. Rodney has been very helpful – offering to lend us all the tools we’ll need to do the job and even helping us out with some paint to mark up persistent stumps.

    The weather forecast isn’t looking as happy as it could but to be fair it does look like perfect building weather; light showers (with sunny spells), 15deg C and light winds.

    So we’re on track for a great day, if you’d like to help out just send us an e-mail at committee@BlackCanonCollective.co.uk

    Cheers

  • A New Beginning…

    This afternoon the BCC were made aware of yet more uninvited visitors by a friend of the club, Clare. Thankfully we were able to send some members (Ben and Ben) to politely explain the current situation and ask them to leave. The visitors left but not before making a valid point; although they had seen the existing signs (explaining that the site was for BCC members only) none of the signs explained that the area was in fact closed. A mute point perhaps as these were not members, but not an irrelevant one. So Maria, Ian and I set off this evening to put up some additional signs along side the existing signs (see earlier post), we hope that together these will give sufficient information.

    It has become clear that despite our best efforts to inform people of the closure of the site and the reasons behind this they keep on riding. This simply isn’t tolerable given our obligations and so has forced us to take quite drastic measures: We have unmarked every course, and pulled up every single feature rendering the entire site un-rideable. This is not a knee jerk reaction but rather a considered solution to something that could jeopardise everything we are working towards. 90 % of the trails that exist at the allotment are based upon the lie of the land with the odd man made feature thrown in to spice up the trail – however it is the features that get the most attention from newbies and non-regular riders, and so by removing these and making the rest of the trails un-rideable we are removing the very thing that is attracting those with no desire to contribute in a constructive manner.

    The good news is that we can look forward to re-building these trails (as planned) one by one to full IMBA standards without the fear that we will have lost the site before getting started. Thankfully the Longleat estate are even further into the felling of phase one, and so are also preventing large sections of trails from being ridden by default.

    Our goal is to safeguard the future of the area not to prevent people from riding for the sake of it, but given some peoples lack of respect (when clearly informed) we have had no alternative but to take this approach.

    Longleat trails are dead, long live Longleat trails!

  • Club Meeting 29/05/2008

    There will be no club meeting this week (29/05/2008).

    Instead the committee will be conducting more risk assessment work at the site to speed things up a little.

  • Head Forester Meeting

    07:30 this morning Neil, Ben and I met up with Rodney Garton, Head Forester at the Longleat Estate, for our site walk. The point of this meeting was simply to establish which parts of the site we can use at the moment and when the rest will be free from forestry activity.

    We are pleased to say that there is a relatively large area that we can begin working on, once we have completed the risk assessment, and so are working flat out to get this finished!

    A map will be posted up shortly to give a clear picture of the planned areas of felling and associated times…(this has now been done – see here)

  • Temporary Signs

    We now have 8 temporary signs in place around the site which will shortly be replaced by permanent signs.

    We hope that these signs will inform people of our existence and point them in the direction of this site where they can learn more .

  • Licence Now in Place

    We now have the licence back from the Longleat Estate; this means that we’ve succeeded in saving the site and will be able to ride there again soon! There are still many things to do before we can though; complete the risk assessment, repair the tracks and wait for the felling to stop but this is a major step.

  • Raising Awareness

    We are trying to raise peoples awareness of the BCC and so we’ve printed off some business cards to give out to local riders. If you’ve received one of these then you’ve come to the right place. If you have run out of cards then please send us an e-mail and we’ll send you some more!

  • Kind Donation

    I am pleased to announce that the BCC has today accepted a £500 donation from Mr Graham Batt.

    Graham (father of Ben and Tim) approached the club about a month ago, asking if he could help in some way by making a donation.

    This most generous donation has been made specifically to help the club get up and running by bridging the gap between our start up costs and current bank balance.

    On behalf of the club and all its current members I have said a big thank you to Graham, however please leave any comments bellow and I will make sure that Graham receives them.

    Grahams Auto Repair business can be found here

  • British Cycling Affiliation

    We are now affiliated with the British Cycling federation (BC) , you can see our club details here.

    This gives us our Third Party Liability Insurance as stipulated by the Longleat Estate and many other benefits including reduced personal British Cycling membership fees and many more. See www.britishcycling.org.uk for more details.