Our Annual General Meeting will be held at 7:00pm on the 24th May at Oakham Library. All members are welcome; in particular we would like members who are interested in elected positions on the committee to attend.
Now that our Awards for All funding from the Big Lottery Fund has all been used up, we’ve put together a short summary with lots of photos of all the events and activities we were able to arrange thanks to the funding. Join us for a wander down memory lane – click here to read the Awards for All summary report!
A big thanks to the Big Lottery Fund, and also to the Wildlife Trust for Birmingham & the Black Country who were instrumental in helping to arrange and deliver these events.
We’ve also added this report to our Governance page so it’s easy to find in future.
Our Annual General Meeting will be held on Saturday 4th June at 2:00pm at Oakham Library. All members are welcome to attend! The AGM takes place straight after the Sandnats walk on the Rowley Hills at 10:30am on the same day so we hope some of you will be able to make it to both. Full details of this walk can be found on our Events page.
The AGM agenda will be as follows:
The full venue details are Oakham Library, Poplar Rise, Tividale, Oldbury, West Midlands, B69 1RD; telephone 01384 255 563.
At one of our recent events, Jim Rippin, a local resident, showed us some photos he’d taken as a young boy in the 1950s of the Rowley Hills. The site has changed so much that it is hard to imagine it was the same area that we see today. He has kindly given his permission for us to reproduce a couple of them here, alongside another image from a book cover, taken in the 1980s. Our Vice Chair Mike Poulton took photos of the same areas from approximately the same vantage point to illustrate how much has changed.
We’ve also added these photos to our History page to build upon our record of the history of the Rowley Hills. If you have any old photos of the area, from any time, we would love to hear from you! We can easily scan or photograph images so don’t need to keep original photos, just loan them temporarily; we can also touch up scratches etc. if required so don’t worry if your photos are a bit battered! Potentially, we would like to put on an exhibition in the future of historic photos like these, depending on how many we are able to source, so please get in touch with us today if you have any old photos you’d be happy to show us. Thank you!
Fantastic news! We are very happy to be able to announce that we’ve been successful in securing a £10,000 Awards for All grant from the Big Lottery Fund. These grants fund a wide range of community projects aimed at developing skills, improving health, revitalising the local environment and enabling people to become more active citizens. Our application was overseen by the Wildlife Trust for Birmingham & the Black Country with whom we work closely; our thanks to them for their great assistance in helping us obtain this funding.
The Wildlife Trust will also be helping to deliver the majority of the activities paid for by the funding, over the next 12 months. Although yet to be finalised, the money is likely to be spent on activities such as guided walks and other events, training for our members so that we can deliver more future events, and supplies necessary for the upkeep of the Rowley Hills.
Great news – six waymarker posts have now been erected in various places across Portway Hill pointing out the official Public Rights of Way linking Portway with Bury Hill Park and the Wolverhampton Road. We are grateful to Sandwell Metropolitan Borough Council and the Local Access Forum for making this possible.
Friends of Rowley Hills committee member Bob Duncan alongside one of the newly installed waymarker posts.
31st March 2015
We’ve updated our Events and Meetings pages. We have two upcoming events – guided walks in June and July run by the Wildlife Trust for Birmingham & the Black Country, on which you will be able to observe and learn more about the very special flora and fauna of the Rowley Hills. Our new Meetings page now includes the dates of all our Committee and General meetings to be held this year.
10th March 2015
We’ve added two new areas to our website. On the Governance page, you can now read our Constitution and the minutes of all the meetings we’ve held so far. You can now also become a member of the Friends of Rowley Hills, by either filling in the online webform or printing out and posting a PDF version. As a member, you will receive updates about our work and will be entitled to attend and cast votes at our general meetings.
21st January 2015
Welcome to our website! The Friends of Rowley Hills is a newly set up group that aims to conserve and enhance the Rowley Hills for people and for wildlife. This website is still in the process of being built but keep checking back, we’ll be adding more content regularly!
Friends of Rowley Hills 