Meadows Yard footpath project
Meadows Yard Local Nature Reserve, Fillyside Road, Seafield, Edinburgh, EH7 6RD
The site
Meadows Yard is a Local Nature Reserve owned and managed by the City of Edinburgh Council. It has an area of 1.8 hectares and is located just inland from the coast at Craigentinny, opposite the Local Civic Amenity Site. In its history the site has been a sewage-irrigated meadow, railway sidings, and allotments, with Edinburgh Council acquiring the site in 1981 and designating it a Local Nature Reserve in May 2002. Today the site is mainly used by local people for recreation and dog walking and by schools.
The site is diverse when compared to other urban sites of a similar size and includes an established scrub area, a pond with adjacent marsh, a young woodland and a wildflower meadow. It is a valuable habitat for birds with goldfinches and song thrush regularly seen. The pond and marshland is also an important habitat for amphibians such as recently observed palmate newts. For this reason, the site is used by youth groups for carrying out environmental education work. One of the main weaknesses of the site is its path network, which is poor. This means that the site is perhaps less heavily used than might otherwise be the case.
The project
To extend the footpath constructed by New Caledonian Woodlands volunteer groups in 2008 and 2009 so that it leads further into the reserve, and to a small pond which is a focal area for the site. This path will be made using bark chips. As such, the work involved in the project will include digging out the foundations of the path to a depth of about fifteen centimetres, laying down a weed suppressing liner to prevent future weed growth, and spreading bark in the foundations to a depth of fifteen centimetres.
