Category Archives: News

News at Blaen Bran Community Woodland, keep up to date with the latest information for general public

ATTENTION : Horse Riding Members

Over the past week, emails have been sent to horse riding members about the locks being changed on the gates. The locks will be changed on Saturday 5th October at approximately 2pm.

If you have not received an email, please email membership@blaenbran.wales to arrange to exchange the key.

For lapsed members, the Horse Riding Agreement you agreed to does state that the horse membership includes the lease of the key, so it must be returned to us at the end of your membership. If you haven’t already done so, can you please contact me at the email address above to arrange the return. There will be no fine or black marks against you!!. We can sell multiple locks using the same key with multiple keys on to other organisations – and the more keys we have the more we can get back from our initial payout. As a charity, this counts a little to our cashflow, so it is much appreciated if you can return the keys!!

Green Flag Community Award

Once again BBCW has reached the high standards needed to achieve the internationally renowned Green Flag Community Award, from #GreenFlagWales.

This is the 9th year we have achieved this award and we must say a big thank you to our group of volunteers and everyone who has helped towards this. Especially those of you who take home your own litter/dogs waste or pick up after others.

ITS HAPPENING – Tree Planting Session Saturday 29-04-2023

Following our request for interest in the Tree Planting volunteer session, we are holding it on Saturday 29th April from 10.00am to approximately 12:00pm. Anyone is welcome to come up and help – bring who you can 🙂 !! We have 1000 trees to do, so why not use the woodland as a gym for the day. Maybe bring the family so you can have your own ‘special area’ of the woodland that you planted with your children so they can grow up with the trees and see them develop. The more volunteers we get, the quicker the job will be!

As there is some track work and removal of diseased trees which is a little behind schedule, it will be necessary for anyone volunteering to meet us at the ford (near the Mineslope Cottage) at the entrance to the woodland by 10:00am. The location (using What Three Words) is https://w3w.co/risky.locker.chains . We we will escort you from there to the tree planting area using the safest route.

Please ensure you bring some warm/waterproof clothes (in case of a change in the weather), a drink and some snacks with you. Tools will be provided and you will be shown what needs doing and how when you are there.

Hopefully see you there!

BBCW Committee

Membership Database Audit

Blaen Bran Community Woodland are currently performing an annual check on our membership database to check it is up to date.

We have sent an email with subject “BBCW – Membership audit and volunteering question” to all our paid members on the evening of 20th April 2023.

Due to specific email queries, it has recently come to our attention that some members are not receiving emails into their normal Inbox, but they are going into users “Junk” folder.

Can you please check your emails to see if you have had one, and if so, reply to it?

If you have not received an email at all and you are a member, it is likely we don’t have an email address for you, so please email me at membership@blaenbran.wales from your preferred contact email address with :
– your first name and surname
– your existing website username (only if you have already registered on the website)

I can then confirm we have you on our membership database (we have no contact details for some members!).

If you do not use or monitor your email address, please let us know via Facebook private message instead.

We are in the process of updating our membership process to make things easier for you and our volunteer membership coordinator and communications people to administrate, maximise your privacy in internal processes and allow us to introduce (hopefully exciting!) member only content onto the website over the next few months.

Note that all BBCW staff who maintain the woodland are volunteers. Membership subscriptions currently go towards all costs associated with keeping the woodland insured, safe for users, for subcontractor costs for work that we can’t legally do ourselves, and also materials and machinery for the woodland maintenance our volunteers do. In our spare time, we want to provide member only content on the website, but this involves time and skills many of our volunteers don’t have, so is a bit slow going! If you want to contribute to the website or physical woodland tasks, please contact enquiries@blaenbran.wales.

Thanks for your continued support.

BBCW Committee