Friends of Marple Memorial Park Task Days
The Friends hold regular task days in the park on the last Saturday of each month in the winter and the middle and last Saturday from March to November. Everyone is welcome to join in for as long or as short they wish during the specified times. Please note that children and young people under 18 must be accompanied by a responsible adult.
If you are interested becoming a volunteer with us please get in touch and we will add you to our Task Day notifications.
We like to keep a record of what we get up and here are details of past task days.
The sunshine was a lovely welcome for our first task day of the year!
Our task days are off to a slow start this year due to other commitments of Mark and Gill who normally lead them. They are sadly winding down their involvement in the group over the coming couple of months, and this is expected to be the penultimate task day they will lead. The last should be Saturday 30 March, if other demands on their time allow.
Although the weather was great the park is still incredibly wet, so volunteers focused on removing the grass that has been taking hold on the French Boules Court, and a good cut-back and tidy-up of the War Memorial Beds. An overdue litter-pick was also completed and volunteers admired the tidy-up of our store during tea break!
New volunteer task leaders needed
The group is appealing for new volunteers who would like to get involved in leading task days. Spaces are currently available for task leader and power-tools training with the council on Saturday 20 April 2024 to get you started. So if this is of interest, now is the perfect time to sign-up! Please get in touch here.
Installation of Nativity Sculptures on Market Street
It's become a tradition for Friends of Marple Memorial Park to end our year by installing Wayne Chaisty's Nativity Sculptures in the Town Centre.
We took over the task of storing and managing the sculptures from Churches Together several years ago as they were having trouble handling them when stored at All Saints' Church. It's much easier for us to keep them at the park and we can transport them to Market Street without vehicles, so much greener too!
It was fun to supervise this small team of volunteers as they did their community service this morning!
Cold start to a glorious day day in the park!
It was a very cold start but we soon warmed up in the sunshine as we began working and it was a lovely day to be in the park.
Due to the frost we left flowerbeds alone and focused on tidying around benches (and the stocks) which now require extra work after we persuaded the council to stop using weedkiller around them earlier this year. We also swept the paths on the main drive into the park, tidied the Reading Circle and did our usual litter-pick.
A mini-task day to secure the wreaths around the War Memorial
We usually manage to secure the wreaths around the war memorial after the Remembrance Sunday service but it was a bit wet, cold and blowy, so we waited for a more favourable weather-window. That arrived today and we got the wreaths anchored down. Hopefully they will stay in place until it's time to remove them, which we usually do in January.
Brollies out at the Remembrance Service on Sunday 12 November 2023
A stunning Remembrance Day in Memorial Park!
The park was beautiful in the early mist this morning, which was burned away by glorious sunshine in time for 11am. There were lots of people in the park for the two minutes silence and we orchestrated this informally using a recording of The Last Post and Reveille that was quite moving, despite the (insert your own word) talking through it on his phone.
In terms of tasks today, we planted several hundred bulbs supplied by the council behind the benches overlooking the Bowling Green, did some work in the Infants Play Area, picked litter and put the finishing touches to our preparations for the Remembrance Sunday Service tomorrow. We always like the park to look its very best and we've been well assisted in this aim by TLC's park maintenance operatives too, who have also put in a lot of extra work during the past week. We thank them for their efforts on this.
After tea break we headed down to the Lock 10 entrance to dismantle some large branches that someone had dragged into the park from the canal.
Remembrance is approaching and we like the park to look its best!
Today we focused on tidying the main flowerbeds and edging the paths on the approaches to the war memorial as we head towards the month of Remembrance. We also added topsoil to the Sensory Garden opposite the Scout Hut and did a litter-pick around the park. It's clear some park visitors are picking litter too, and we thank you for that!
We met with Zoe from Marple Mutual Aid for a photo shoot at the Covid memorial and you will hopefully see an article about this in the Marple Review soon.
Boules court maintenance is underway too
We also had an inbetweenie task day recently to begin overdue maintenance on the French Boules Court - it looks like we have a big job breaking out with tired sleepers!
