Restoration Blog

Ham Mill 4th Feb 2019

by: Matthew J.

Our regular blogger Andy P. is taking a well-earned break this week, but it was still a good turn-out on Monday with Bob, Duncan, Maurice, Matthew, Jason and Kay turning up to do battle with the mud once again.
First job of the day was to complete the new temporary (2) towpath by levelling off the ground by the non-retaining wall and adding further temporary (11) trench boards to meet up with the temporary (9) trench boards laid last week. (See last week’s blog to make sense of this). A few unfortunate walkers who turned up in the middle of all this had to traverse some extremely temporary (12) arrangements to get through, but the final result didn’t look too bad.

Having finally got the towpath away from the line of the new bypass pipe, the rest of the day was spent on trench warfare, starting with the sloping path going down under the bridge.

An old gas pipe intruding through the side of the trench gave Bob an excuse to get the disc cutter out again and create another impressive shower of sparks.

Several hours later and after much digging, scraping and barrowing, we’d made a satisfyingly deep hole, and trudged home in our muddy boots content with another good days’ progress.