Saturday morning dawned very cold and bright. Given our earlier start time of 09.30 for work mornings at the Warren it really did seem a bit like the crack of dawn! The sun was still low in the sky and had not yet melted any of the frost on the ground.
The job for the morning was to cut short the heather on a couple of areas on the barrow opposite the 39 Steps. The point of the exercise is to make the leggy heather regenerate and to help provide a mosaic of habitats of heathers of different ages.
A couple of large rectangular areas, which had old, leggy heather, were marked out.
Cutting the heather was done using hand tools
As you can see it required a lot of bending, kneeling, crouching and sitting.
The request to wear Christmas hats was heeded by some though there was some improvisation.
The cuttings were bagged up to be taken off site. Any heather seed will be used to re-seed areas at Warren Hill.
While hand cutting the heather seems labour intensive the reason why it should be done this way became evident to us in quite a spectacular way. While Mareline was kicking back some heather roots she noticed some movement and lifting the heather out of the way this is what she found!
You can see from the distinct diamond pattern that this is an adder. It is surprising that in such cold weather it was only sheltering amongst the heather roots and not under ground. It was also relatively low on the barrow slope so at 11.00, around the time this photograph was taken, the sun was still too low in the sky to shine in this area (as you can see from the photographs above).
You can see that the adder was quite a big one. 
We got a good view of the adder as it wasn’t moving very fast, but it clearly wanted to be left alone. We covered it back up and stopped working in the rectangle we had found it in. This is a good example why you should avoid walking on, and keep children and dogs off, the heather areas, even in wintertime. It can disturb the wildlife and could result in a nasty bite.