Fosseway / Falkland Road
Over recent months we have continued the towpath along the road side of
Falkland Road once the brick soldier courses had been added to top off the wall.
This almost completes the work in Section 'A' with just bit more sheet piling to
add to the field side and its towpath to also be topped out.
We also started to fix the sponsored tags from the Piling Tags appeal to the piles and you can see the ones we have done so far on the website here.
The next section along Falkland Road is an area called Section 'B' and is not yet
in the ownership of the Trust. The Council had previous difficulties with Traveller
incursions onto other sections of their land and so were worried that the Trust
would have reduced powers to move them on and so asked us to build a low-level
earth bund wall along the remaining road side of Falkland Road and Claypit Lane.
The low-level bund wall work was completed over March and April.
In late March sections of the bund were subsequently planted with hedging
(donated by South Staffs Water) and kept well-watered.
We lost count of the
number of starlings that congregated on our earthworks to take mouthfuls of
worms back to their chicks. They got very close to the machines in order to get
early access to recently excavated earth.
The bank bund wall was finally grassed with material stripped from the
adjacent area and the completed bund is already growing well on the road
side and will provide habitat for a range of small species.
Read more on the
bund and the planting on our news page here.
The last couple of jobs that we did were in the adjacent Fosseway, we completed the towpath across the back of the basin wall (thus creating a circular walking route around Fosseway). Early afternoon standing on our access ramp on the top of the basin wall and its amazing to look down the Fosseway towards Wood Lock 18 and see just how many walkers, joggers and even cyclists are using this site now.
We have also done a bit of tidying up, mainly because of an arson attack on a couple of our waste storage bins. So we tidied the area and disposed of several tonnes of unusable waste material as well. The last job that we have done is to change the layout of our storage compound to make it far easier to get the machines in and out when we eventually start the serious work of relocating several thousand tonnes of earth from the remaining section of Falkland Road going up to Claypit Lane – moving the spoil into the area between the canal and railway line, next to our compound.
We are told that the Papers to release the next parcel of land for Section 'B' are complete and listed for the next Council Committee in August. Let’s hope it all goes through and we can start on the next section in a couple of months time.
Michael Babb
