Happy St. Patrick's Day!

Despite what you all may be thinking, we did not spend our day hopping from pub to pub in celebration of St. Patrick's Day! No, instead we headed off early this morning to the town of Dorking (go ahead and laugh at the name, we did). Today was our community service day, and we helped out at Leith Hill, a beautiful area owned by the National Trust. Leith Hill operates similar to how a national park would in the US, there are over 800 acres of land with hiking trails, camping and picnicking areas and of course Leith Tower, which offers a brilliant view of the surrounding countryside. We took the train into Dorking and upon arrival were met by a van that took us over to the hill. There we met Rose, who works for the National Trust and she was our guide/supervisor for the day. We started by putting in fence posts, which was really an interesting process. A few people ran ahead and laid out the posts, followed by a team of people aligning the posts and others using a metal rammer thing to force the posts in. It went really quickly with 11 of us and we were done by late morning. Then we had a tea and biscuit break! Even in the wilderness the Brits have to have their tea. Rose was nice enough to bring tea for all of us and a bagful of delicious shortbread cookies and these awesome marshmallow and chocolate things! They were so good! Rose also brought along her dog, a German Shepherd named Rex. He was so adorable and very playful, his favorite thing to do was to grab our hands (luckily we had work gloves on) and just tug on us until we either pushed him away or Rose called him off. But basically the whole day he followed us around and kept going after our hands. He really was cute and clearly liked all the attention. So after the tea/play with Rex break we headed over to another piece of land to cut down small trees to stop them from encroaching on the land. We broke for lunch for a bit and then burned the trees in a brush pile. The trees were on a pretty steep hill so after a few times of lugging trees down the hill and climbing all the way back up we finally figured out it would be more efficient if two people worked together. So we had people meeting in the middle of hill, one person collected the trees at the top and the other person threw them into the pile. Our legs definitely thanked us for figuring that one out.
After all the work was done we toured the Leith Hill Tower, and despite the cloud cover the view was still spectacular! There was beautiful green countryside everywhere you looked. On a clear day you are supposed to be able to see the ocean from the tower but we had no such luck today. The grounds around the tower were very pretty as well, with lots of good climbing trees! We took a pretty epic group photo of all of us in a tree, that will hopefully get posted later! We left the hill around 4 and were back to the train station before 5. It was really a great way to spend the day, it was nice to get to see some of the countryside and get away from the city and touristy attractions for a day. Tomorrow is already Friday, I cant believe how fast this week had gone by! Its our free day tomorrow, so a few of us are hitting the Natural History Museum and then who knows! Stayed tuned for the details!
-Amy