Tuesday
Tuesday was the penultimate day at beautiful Bridgend Allotments. Tobias, Martin and Rob got on with laying the last three slabs on the slope, which was a deceptively difficult task which took several hours of shifting and grunting to eradicate the slabs’ wobbliness. We started off the barbecue area, laying 2 slabs on top of a base of hardcore and then put the wet mix on top.
Kate and her small team of helpers attacked the wild unkempt willow structure beside the hut (which was apparently constructed using a £2000 prize given to the allotments a few years back) and the rest continued laying whin dust over the top of the layered hardcore. The day went well and the volunteers really sweated for their community and for BTCV and we were proud of their efforts. Special praise goes to Derek for his idea to embed the pebbles in mortar at the edge of the path, adding to the rustic individually old-fashioned nature of the path. BTCV puts pebble dashing back in fashion!!! 🙂
Wednesday
I kicked off Wednesday with a big mistake; I promised the volunteers an early finish as we didn’t have much work left to do at Bridgend. Unfortunately by the time we had visited Homebase and had some tea we were behind schedule before we started. The majority of the small group set to work clearing the weeds from the garden area and Tommy and a couple of other s started barrowing up whin dust from the bulk bugs that were left. Tobias, Sarah and I got started mixing cement for the barbecue area, unfortunately the sand had absorbed a lot of moisture from the rainy Scottish summer overnight and it took us about an hour and several bags of sand and whin dust to reduce the moisture in the mix. I tired Sarah out with my search for perfection in the barbecue area as it proved extremely difficult to achieve a level surface without the correct scraping tool to do the job levelling out the mortar mix.
Lunch was spent munching on Neasa’s delicious cakes and by the time we had tidied up the area and taken photos of the site and the group it was a tired and damp group of volunteers that left the worksite with 10 leftover bags of cement in the minibus.
Thursday
Today we were at Easter Craiglockart Hill Nature Trail. The tasks involved re-installing two reference posts within the trail, clearing paths and general tidy up of the site.
After pushing our three wheelbarrows up the steep slope we arrived at our first post. Pat, Martin and Rob got immediately stuck in while the rest of us carried on to the second area. The second area was slightly tricky as we had to try and find the post that had been pulled out of the ground. Unfortunately this area lay beside a steep slope…where we think people may have being trying to have a caber tossing competition with the old post and mistakenly it ended up over the edge… Anyhow we, not people to be defeated, battled on and constructed a temporary post from debris lying around the area.
By this point the team congregated and worked together clearing the area of litter and tidying up the path. After lunch we had the fun job of tidying up the cobbled entrance to the trail. We worked on our hands and knees removing all the weeds and grass from the path until it was sparkling. All in all a job well done!