Last Wednesday, we were again doing work for the Edinburgh City Council Natural Heritage Service, this time at Burdiehouse Burn Valley Park. The park is a corridor that follows the course of the burn as it meanders its way through South East Edinburgh.
The job today was carrying out path work around the Ellen’s Glen entrance to the park. As a result of recent rain, parts of the path had been damaged by floods and were looking slightly worse for wear in places. Once we had found the site (using the ancient and venerated technique of navigation by iphone) and eaten most of the biscuits, we started work.
The morning’s job was scraping back the path to the wooden edge, removing all of the mud and encroaching grass. Unfortunately, I very much regret to say that in certain places the wooden border was reported Missing in Action, leading to a certain amount of guesswork as to what was supposed to be path and what wasn’t.
Whilst this was going on, Euan (whose last Wednesday was today, boooo!) and Dave worked on clearing out the drainage ditch at the side of the path, to hopefully avoid the flooding that caused all the problems in the
first place.
After lunch and onto part two of the day, barrowing hardcore and whin dust around to repair the worst areas of the paths. The materials had been predelivered a few days before, however by the time we got there, some of it had strangely vanished… A most perplexing mystery. This lent a certain urgency to the job as we tried to use up the rest before any more went walkabouts, barrowing hardcore to where it was required and smoothing it out with a rake, before finishing it off with the whin dust. Luckily, Team TCV were easily up to the job, easily finishing well before 3.
Unfortunately, there was still a lot of hardcore left, so Dave went off looking for more areas of path to repair to use the rest of it up. Having found one, we all headed down with shovels and spades to scrape back the mud, before plonking the rest of the hardcore down.
Having created a path of such smoothness to rival a continental motorway, we headed off home after a great days work. Thanks everyone!