Well this week was a little bit annoying thanks to rangers – who kept changing their plans! We also had to struggle by this week without Rob…so naturally thats the reason all plans went a bit fruit-shaped – although turned out fine in the end.
The main challenge for the week was to create 3 storage bays in the Hermitage of Braid by the stables. The general idea was to construct these bays out of reclaimed timber -using whatever we could find.
On Tuesday, preliminary holes were dug, after some heated debate about the finer points of hole positioning and depth. With the assistance of our useful firestarter Kate we burnt several pieces of wood by the walled garden although unfortunately no-one had thought to bring sausages to sizzle in the flames, due to our rather randomly changing schedule.
On the higher path, Neil, (ex VO)Dave, David (Connolly)and (Canadian) Dave and myself cracked into adding an extra sleeper to the three bridges. This was a highly technical piece of work requiring some head-fogging engineering and by the time 3pm arrived we still hadn’t finished although were thoroughly physical mentally and spiritually satisfied, with Dave (Connolly) so hungry for more engineering action he even came back to finish the job on Wednesday!!
By Wednesday morning, the plans had changed again! The bays were now wanted to be smaller ….which effectivley meant that the holes which had been dug on Tuesday were in the wrong place, and had to be filled in again. New holes were measured and the digging began again.
All was going fairly well, holes deeping quickly despite the strange differences in ‘soil’ quality, when Neasa encountered a problem rock at the bottom of one hole. Alan went at it with a pinch bar – soon to remove it….only to come across a small black pipe underneath….closer inspection revealed an inscription of *ELECTRICITY* on the ‘rock’…..so (yet again) we moved the hole elsewhere… By the end of the day all posts had been secured and concreted into the ground.
The rest of the group had spent the day ‘improving’ the sleeper bridges which we put in a few weeks back. This involved adding an extra sleeper – to allow mountain bikes, wheelchairs and small herds of elephants to cross the streams with ease.There was cake (and sunshine) for lunch – as it was Tommy’s birthday.
Thursday we were back – determined to do two things:
- finish painting the railings of the bridges (now that the paint had finally arrived)
- to finish these storage bays once and for all!
Pam and Neil spend the day on the first task… with only 3 tins of black paint… and there seemed to be a little bit left over.
The rest of the group started by selecting the timber for the rails and hammering in some rather fierce looking nails. The rangers wanted (haha – last time checked) timber logs at the back of the bays for aesthetic reasons. So this was done – ‘rustic style’.
After lunch (most of which was spent inside due to the pouring rain after some fat uncontrollable labrador nicked John’s roll) the holes in the bays became a bit more noticable – especially as we were told they were supposed to contain whin dust (!) So we used some split logs to fill in the gaps around the exterior. Pat was still busy filling in the interior holes when the first of the barrow-loads of whin dust arrived. When the bay was a good half-full, it was suggested that we fill in the remainder of the holes with some empty tonne-bags – and so we set about cutting the bags with a 2in penknife.
All in all the bays now look fantastic, so a very well done to all for this!!
To view photos of past and present projects and our volunteers in action please click here