Wargrave, Twyford and Travelers on the Ridgeway

Hi everyone,

We had a great turnout for last weekend’s walks, with many regulars and new walkers alike – and a warm welcome to those of you who have just joined our group and the Ramblers as members!

This coming weekend, we have two walks lined up – I’m leading a short linear one from Wargrave to Twyford on Saturday morning (which dovetails with our afternoon/evening social at the Twyford Beer Festival*), while Dan is leading a longer walk on Sunday around the Ridgeway in West Berkshire.

We need more walks for most weekends in July! If you see a gap in the programme and think you can offer a walk to fill it, please get in touch with Sam to check the date is free (if there’s nothing on the website, it probably is) and then submit your walk. If you’re not quite sure what is involved in leading a walk, please see this recent blog post or speak to Sam or anyone else on the committee. Ramblers centrally also have a series of Zoom-based “walk leader conversations”, including some specifically aimed at new and potential leaders (the next is Monday lunchtime).

Behind the scenes, we’ve been making some changes to streamline the way we manage walk submissions and sign-up forms. Manual processing of these has been taking up a lot of time for Sam and Jason, so a huge thank you for all their work. This blog post from Shannon (who’s put a lot of time into automating parts of the process) explains the changes, including a revamp of the “submit a walk” form to integrate it with the sign-up system. You may also notice some changes in how the walk description pages and the event listing in the emails are laid out as part of this streamlining, as well. Please do get in touch with the committee if you have suggestions for further improvement.

Finally, we have our next committee meeting on 6th July – if there’s anything you’d like us to consider, or you’d like to come along, please get in touch with Rachel. With the AGM coming up in the autumn, this is a great way to get more familiar with how things run if you’re interested in standing for next year’s committee.

Zak
Membership Secretary

* This event is still going ahead, although the extension of Covid restrictions means that the format will be a little different to usual. Please see the event website for details – although if you haven’t already got a ticket, I’m afraid the Saturday is sold out.