IF YOU went down to the woods this week, you’d have been in for a big surprise – not from teddy bears, but tree-trolls and totem poles.

As part of its Easter holiday activities programme, award-winning Oxfordshire charity Yellow Submarine took over the Hill End outdoors centre for the day to get back to nature.

Yellow Submarine helps young people with moderate learning disabilities or autism. Once registered with the charity, they offer a host of activities and trips to 11 to 18-year-olds to challenge and entertain them.

The charity’s activities coordinator Anna Cheetham was getting involved in the mud-slinging. She said: “We had 20 kids with us and we tried to get them as muddy as we possibly could.

“The great thing about the activities days are the kids just being able to go outside and play in the mud and play around like kids should. There were a lot of very tired children.

“We split into different tribes and painted our faces, and then we did a stream walk. We had a game of forest rounders, sang songs around the fire, cooked hot dogs and had an Easter egg hunt.”

This week’s activities were part of the charity’s holiday club, which is run during school holidays throughout the year.

Yellow Submarine also runs residential trips through half-terms and holidays, taking groups of five young people at a time on full-board holidays to Blackpool, Alton Towers or even Disneyland Paris, aiming to encourage independence and build confidence.

Miss Cheetham, 32, added: “At the Hill End centre we have been weaving a totem pole – weaving willow around a tree trunk to make a permanent structure which will mark a time capsule the kids made at February half-term.

“They children drew a self-portrait, wrote down their ages and what they would like to be when they grow up and we sealed all those up in the time capsule. Then we buried it, so that when the kids are older we can go back and dig it up.

“It’s a really precious thing, because it has all of their goals and dreams in it.”

“We also went and visited the plum tree we planted at February half-term – it has a plaque which reads ‘Planted by the young adventurers of Yellow Submarine.’”

Miss Cheetham said this week looked set to be Yellow Submarine’s busiest ever, with a trip to Woburn Safari Park, a multi-sports day including break-dancing and wheelchair basketball, and a trip to the Oxford Playhouse to see I Believe in Unicorns by Michael Morpurgo.

The biggest outing will be to RAF Brize Norton, which has Yellow Submarine as one of its nominated charities.

Hosted by Squadron 47, the kids will get to look around a Hercules aircraft, use the private RAF bowling alley, and then have a barbeque with the squadron.