Today, we visited Milton Country Park in North Cambridge. Created from old gravel pits the park offers a varied natural habitat with woodland, lakes, and attractive pathways.

As part of our therapeutic community we like to visit natural spaces, especially woodland. There is plenty of evidence of the great physical and mental health benefits from spending time in trees and with wildlife. And our group members definitely agree.

Siobhan brought us some swan and duck food and the group members all enjoyed feeding the waterfowl. We identified and chatted about the different species including Ducks, Coots, Little Grebe, Moorhens, Cormorants, Swans, Gulls.

As we walked around the lakes we identified the tree species and discussed some of the woodland management techniques used in Milton, including coppicing and hedge laying.

Whilst we walked around the beautiful surroundings we spotted some great features to add to our community garden and forest skills spaces, including this amazing sundial and compass.

We're definitely going to build a human sundial on our site. Watch this space!

We believe that having fun together and play (yes, even adults need to play!) also has great benefits for physical and mental health.

So, we also collected items whilst we walked so we could play Animal, Vegetable, Mineral when we sat down to have a coffee and cake. The game is another fun way to encourage discussion and learning about the environment, what occurs in nature and what is synthetic or 'manmade.' Each person takes it in turns to be questioned about their secret found object and can only answer yes or no. The group have to guess what the secret item is. Out of all the natural and un-natural items we found including feathers, berries, seed heads, buttons, beads, the weirdest must have been a potato masher found by Siobhan!!!

We had a fantastic therapeutic day in the woods with the trees, lakes, waterfowl, squirrels, birds and lovely people.