Old Lock 24 - Tamworth Road
It has been an extremely wet December and consequently there hasn’t been
much progress at the Tamworth Road Narrows, only the most hardiest of
volunteers has dared venture onto this site.
There has however been work carried out at three other worksites during the
early part of December, as well as Bill Breresford's work at Wood Lock 18, and you only need to to look at these photos taken a year apart to see the progress made.
Fosseway
Firstly this month, there was a fairly considerable tidy up at Fosseway. The area between the canal and the former railway has been used for storage of
a wide range of products and materials over recent years.
It was probably
considered out of sight and therefore out of mind but its not until you see the
area using GPS mapping software such as https://w3w.co/successes.animal.tens
(and switch to satellite view) that you can visualise just how untidy the
area had actually become. It is far cleaner now because we have tidied it in
readiness to receive spoil from an adjacent site due to be transported over the
Christmas break period.
We needed to construct a lay-by on Tamworth Road in order to collect the spoil
though first.
Tamworth Road (between Fishface and Cricket Lane)
A lay-by needed to be constructed on Tamworth Road at https://w3w.co/friend.aware.pumps
in order to remove the spoil from the
previously excavated Gallows Wharf (London Bridge) to Gallows Reach
section (that had been deposited along Tamworth Road - from Fishface
bridge to Cricket Lane) and it would make sense to also reduce the ground
level and try to dig out some of this next section if time over Christmas
allowed.
In all there is probably in excess of 2,500 cubic metres of soil/spoil to
remove so it won’t be possible to remove it all.
There was also the dreaded
pipe to contend with and this would further complicate the extraction. The
first step however was to relocate some of the spoil either side of the lay-by
in order to make it easier for the larger machines to load the trailers quickly.
Falkland Road
There can be very few benefits of excavating a canal channel and thence
leaving the area cleared but not in water. However, one benefit occurred at
Darnford in that it became an ideal place for pioneering silver birch seeds to
blow into the recently cleared channel from the adjacent parkland and for
trees to then self-seed. It was amazing how fast the trees took hold of their
new ground, the channel bed seeming providing shelter from the worst of the
elements and encouraging rapid growth.
In Autumn this year however, the trees had become a bit too large, they could
not remain in the canal channel, but nor were they going to be wasted and
therefore nearly two dozen of the largest were carefully dug out from the
channel and relocated.
They are now on Falkland Road, planted at 10 metre intervals some 2 metres
from the road and will hopefully provide a bit of ‘interest’ on an otherwise
uninteresting perimeter bund wall.
The 22 silver birch trees would only have gotten us about a third of the way
down this final section of Falkland Road, but luckily they weren’t the only
trees planted.
A kind financial donation from Lichfield u3a, which is a UK-wide
movement of locally run interest groups providing learning and leisure
activities for retired people, meant that a further fifteen trees could be
purchased from a local garden centre.
It felt a bit strange when we started constructing the bund along the final
section of Falkland Road between Birmingham Road and Claypit Lane (an
area we call Zone C). On the first section we were leaving gaps for the trees
to be subsequently planted but on this section the trees were already in
place and so we were constructing the bund wall either side of them.
It would have been a difficult job to strip the turves a form the 600mm high
and one metre wide bund but we hired a petrol driven turf cutter again and it
made the job of cutting the turves a lot easier. They just then had to be cut to length,
rolled up and placed on the bund wall.
https://w3w.co/saints.smile.shorts
There was some assistance from the DoE’s on the first Saturday and by the end of the week before Christmas we had
collectively managed to complete around 50 metres. Hedging whips will eventually be planted along the top of the bund. Peter was
out on the Wednesday before Christmas and planted out the first 10 metres
or so.
Wood Lock 18
The Big Soil Move
Over the Christmas period an estimated 2,400 tonnes of spoil which had
been dug out from Gallows Reach & Gallows Wharf was moved from
alongside Tamworth Road to Fosseway were it will be used to bulk up the
lowland heathland area. The opportunity was also taken to partly dig out the
canal channel up toward Cricket Lane.
Many thanks to our friends Adam Westwood and Chasetown Civil
Engineering who have loaned us excavators for the job.
For more details it is probably best watch the video where Peter Buck explains all.
