Somerset Litter Picker Visits Curry Rivel

Ankgor Wat

Issy, from Castle School in Taunton, is raising funds for an exciting school trip to Cambodia this year. The trip will support community projects in Cambodia – such as building school or local facilities, helping with land preparation for farming, cleaning the local community etc.

There will also be some fun – sight seeing and a jungle trek!

The trip will cost £4,300 and students are trying to raise funds to help pay for it. Issy has chosen to do this by conducting a year long litter pick around Somerset. She will chose an area and go out weekly for a couple of hours cleaning up the neighbourhood.

This weekend Issy chose our village, Curry Rivel. Here is her report. You can find more information on her facebook page, just follow the link below.

• .
• Hello Curry Rivel!

My name is Issy and I am in year 10 at Castle School in Taunton and in the summer I am going on a school trip to Cambodia and we have to fund raise to support the trip. I am doing a year long sponsored litter pick around Somerset and today Curry Rivel was my destination. I have done 24 litter picks so far covering over 115 km and picking up over 180kg of rubbish. Today we did about 4km in 1.5 hours and got about 7kg of rubbish and recycling. I write a report for all my walks and todays report is below. If you're interested you can find all my reports on my page:
(https://www.facebook.com/SomersetLitterPicker)

If you would like sponsor me and are able to then you can do so here:
(https://gofund.me/78d66343)

For today's litter pick we went to Curry Rivel. We saw a lot of rubbish on the way there, but couldn't pick it up as we were in the car and it was quite a busy road. We were thinking about maybe doing a cycling litter pick to collect the rubbish along that road, as it was just so dirty.

We parked our car just inside the village – but started our litter pick heading out of the village as we had noticed some bottles and cans just before the village sign and we thought we would get those first. We then headed down into Curry Rivel – we turned down a small lane as we thought it would provide us with a loop round to the garage (Dad was wrong) but it did lead us down to a nice park – there was a variety of different equipment and it was in a nice open location. I had a few goes on the zipwire We found lots of little sweet wrappers scattered around, and also some bigger food wrappers – but when we got to the little carpark near the park we found a huge amount of rubbish. Alcohol cans, deodorant cans, fast food wrappers, bags – just a mess – it looked awful. It took a little while but we managed to clean it all up.

There were lots of little things through the main part of Curry Rivel but not too much in the way of big items, but the larger items started appearing again shortly after we passed the garage.

We turned around after about an hour of walking, our bags were getting quite full now! Heading the other way we found quite a few cans, tucked into the bottom of hedges and also on top of the wall by Parsonage Farm.

We found a dog poo someone had left by someone's drive entrance – Dad picked this one up as I'd drawn the short straw last week in Cotford!

We found a pair of gardening gloves, one on the pavement and one in a garden – we figured these were someone's who probably left them on the wall and they had fallen off – so we picked them up and put them back on the wall – a lady then came out of the house opposite to say they were hers – I think she was concerned we were going to throw them away – apologies if this was you! Luckily we had made the right decision!

Overall we did about 4km in 1hr 33 and got 2.72kg of recycling and 4.22kg of rubbish. We measured these on the new scales that Dad bought to replace the ones we have somehow misplaced!

Thank you Issy, and good luck!

(p.s. We loved Cambodia! Ed)