Eastern Team
March 2010 by Ade Mills
March has mostly been taken up with the work of repairing the path at Garburn, near Troutbeck.
The path is around 100 metres in length and has been built using slate placed depth-ways into the ground, over half a metre deep in many areas. A side drain is incorporated alongside the pitching, which runs for the majority of the path’s length and is fed into by a series of cross drains. The Fix the Fells volunteers lent us a hand by building a section of the side drain from the end of the path into a culvert further down the hill.
Once the large stones have been set in place they are tightened from the sides using smaller stones, which are also hammered into any gaps to further strengthen the path.
Once this is completed all the gaps are filled in with soil to make it easier to walk on and to enable sheep to be shepherded along the track without the risk of trapping their hooves.
All of the slate has been delivered from Elterwater Quarry to an area as near to the work site as we could get. From here all the suitable rock is hand-picked into a dumper and moved to the bottom of the path. Next it is transferred into a power barrow and moved up the path to as near the work area as possible. Finally, it is unloaded and carried for the last few metres, to exactly where it is needed.
So far over 100 tonnes of rock have been moved in this way to the work site.
The new path, which replaces the heavily eroded original path, has helped to raise the height of the ground level, which has also had the additional benefit of protecting the surrounding drystone walls from collapsing.
We are now well over three quarters of the way through the job and are hoping that we can complete the path in time, before the imminent helicopter bag filling and starting this season’s upland footpath work.
To find out more about the work carried out by Ade and his team, return to the Eastern team diary archive
