Eastern Team
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February 2010 by Nic Fish
The month started with yet more snow, which hasn’t helped with the progress of the winter projects.
Work continued at Low Fold Gardens (a National Trust cottage) as the fencing was completed and work started on the garden. With the house not being lived in for a number of months the garden had got into a bit of a state.
The plan was to reinstate the old walkway around the house; this took some digging down into the soil to find the old side stones of the path. Many were reusable, although some new stones had to be brought in from the local quarry. For the four of us this was slow work, however we were helped greatly by the monthly work party. Our regulars fought against the weather to almost complete the path. Again this shows the vital role that volunteers play in not just helping with footpath work, but with the huge range of work carried out by the National Trust.
The second half of the month has been spent repairing a flood damaged footpath near Troutbeck (Garbon). We were called in by the National Park to use our expertise of stone pitching.
The path had been badly damaged by the floods last November. The National Park had been given grants by the government to repair damaged footpaths in the Lake District. Our job was to repair a section of the path that had been previously pitched similar to the style you would find on old packhorse routes, with thin slates put in the ground depth ways, much like building a dry stonewall in the ground.
The work has been an interesting change to our usual style of pitching, however some of us might find it hard to go back to our normal ways of working, as we have been lucky enough to have Neil the assistant warden at High Close digging the ground out for us.
Work has gone well and by the end of February we had completed almost 40 metres.
Here’s hoping for the start of Spring in March!
To find out more about the work carried out by Nic and his team, visit the Eastern team diary archive
