Coniston Team
by Rob Clarke, sponsored by Heart of the Lakes Cottages
July 2008
May proved to be quite a varied month for us with lots of tasks to us away from our main job on Stake Pass. However, we've recently had a good stretch of time to concentrate on it and have made some really good progress. The work has been more broken than on previous jobs, consisting mostly of smaller seperate sections of work rather than one long stretch. It's been quite nice leap-frogging each other up the hill (figuratively speaking) as we've each completed our own sections and moved on above the rest of the team to a new one.
There have been some interesting challenges, such as this very wide eroded area. Here the bottom stone of the original path was not dug into level ground, causing the ground below to become eroded away by peoples' feet. Eventually quite a drop appeared below the stone causing people to walk around it (to the left) further widening the erosion scar.
The solution was to build a new section of path starting from level ground to meet up with and support the old one. This involved moving a lot of materials to fill up the hole and provide a base to build the new path on, the end result giving no indication of the work that has gone into constructing it. This is the footpath builder's lot though, a lot of our work is often buried and out of sight!
It's when we see our paths being used that it makes it all worthwhile. The picture below shows some happy walkers on a new stretch of path that was built to re-establish one of Stake Pass's historic old zig-zags. There was a large erosion scar to the right of the path here where people were shortcutting off of thLong-term volunteeringe original line. To combat this a sustainable stone path has been dug into the ground and all the material from this used to build up the banking to the right of it and block off the top of the shortcut.
Everyone now seems to be using this new (old) line and within a surprisingly short time the previously scarred hillside where the shortcut was had started to recover. We might be the only ones who know the amount of work that goes into our footpaths, but we do have the satisfaction of seeing the results of this work and the immediate improvements it can make.
