Coniston Team
by Rob Clarke, sponsored by Heart of the Lakes Cottages
April 2010 – The return to the fells and a tale of two walls
Finally the long winter has drawn to an end and there can be few people as glad of this as we path workers! For months now we’ve been gazing up at the snow bound fells, wondering if it would all clear in time for our return to higher altitudes....
Luckily it did, and in style! Some fantastic warm spring sunshine has seen us up on Bowfell with the Western Valleys team.
The good weather makes work easier but does mean the fells are a lot busier. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing though, because not only do we get a chance to explain our work but we also get an enforced break when we stop to let people past!
left: Walkers giving our path the vote of confidence and enforcing a break
We’re there for a couple of weeks before heading off to our main project for the season, carrying on with the work we started last year on the Borrowdale side of Stake Pass. We’ll be there most of the year and we’re looking forward to continuing to reinstate the lovely swooping curves of this old pack horse route. With this, a smaller job by the ominously named ‘Hell Ghyll’ and one on Pike o Bliscoe (to be completed with a lot of volunteer help) it’s already shaping up to be a very busy year ahead.
Whilst we’re glad to be back on the fells it has been an interesting winter season. After much winching of large rocks we’ve completed rebuilding the flood damaged and collapsed path up Tom Gill, talked about in the central team’s February entry.
This was a real challenge and at times looked like such a mess that we wondered if we’d ever get it finished. However, we’re very happy indeed with the end result. An attractive and well graded path at a good level above the beck, we’re confident of this new section’s ability to stand up to future torrents. The only slight downside is that most people probably won’t notice the amount of work that has gone into creating it, but really we count that as the sign of a job well done.
The new path> The new path>
above: Two views of the lovely new path
We also had some walls to rebuild out of much more manageably sized rock, the most notable being a sheep fold in a farmyard that had had a tree collapse on it. These kind of jobs are often done by a two man estate team, but a big one like this can be quite daunting. This was on the St Catherines property, in Windermere, having us along to help out made for quite a gang and the walls went up in record time. Further proof of the benefits of teamwork!
To find out more about the work carried out by Rob and his team, return to the team diary archive.