Tuesday
On Tuesday we headed out to the Hermitage of Braid. I can’t exactly remember what it was we were supposed to be doing, but suffice to say when we got there; the rangers had changed their minds. (Naturally this meant that we had all the wrong tools – which was occasionally commented on -; the plus being that this meant we had to use the rangers tools ultimately resulting in their tools getting muddy and not ours 🙂 ).
So our job for the day was to: dig drainage channels at the bottom section of the Walled Garden (which has changed fairly dramatically since we were last here). Essentially the bottom section is to become a hard standing area, which people in wheelchairs can use.
So this firstly involved digging the aforementioned channels or trenches around and across the site. Then, later we would place pipes in them and cover the entire area in liner, type 1 and whindust to finish off.
Much fun had by all as the site was extremely waterlogged – or at least the surface was. All the water was draining down the slope onto our site and just ponding – so drainage was required. We were progressing nicely until one of only two mattocks broke. By lunchtime we had most of the outer trenches dug and in the afternoon started barrowing type 1 on to the site. It took us about 10 minutes to later realise we hadn’t laid the liner – so we scraped the type 1 into the wetter patches, and then laid the liner.
Suffice to say there was a lot of mud. Stuart kept finding lots of bones. And Fiona, put us all to shame by barrowing type 1 all afternoon (and on her last day too!).
Wednesday
Work continued on the drainage on Wednesday. After some *slight* plan changes. Although we had left the extremely wet bit (more so than the rest) until today (to ‘give it the chance to dry out’),it was still a complete bog. Still undecided on what to do; we fetched the new (enormous) roll of liner from the stables and started cutting it off into sections, with the aid of Alan’s penknife. This was laid, and raked with type 1.
The weather was nice enough to have lunch outside, so we did. Many, many dogs. By afternoon we realised we would have to do something to attempt to remove some of the water off the site. So we reopened an old drain (which drains out of the site, onto the path and out to the river). The water did not want to flow down hill or obey gravity. It flowed everywhere we didnt want it. But eventually after some hard, muddy and now, watery digging…there was less water. Nothing could be done to drain the rest of the site….this has been left until next time.
Thursday
Went back to North Berwick Glen and did some more path maintenance. Rob’s last day.
The see photos of past and present projects click here