August is a month of holiday taking. And for those who work down at our Fosseway site there are no exceptions. And yet in spite of holidays, work at the Fosseway site progressed, perhaps not as fast as normal, but still progressed at a good rate. I know that on return from a week in Wales, the whole site seemed to have been reconfigured from how I remembered it the week before.
With Roger B's return from holiday, the brick capping on the newly built towpath wall has progressed rapidly. The wall section to the right of the new wetlands area has been completed. And John M has done an excellent job of back-filling this wall and re- establishing the towpath ready for it the be resurfaced along this length. The Summerhill Work Party, led by Phil Cheesewright, has now joined us at Fosseway to work on Tuesdays, effectively shutting down the Summerhill section for a while. This is a huge improvement in so much that it has added another day to our working week here. Currently five days per week, the exceptions being Mondays and Fridays.
Towpath wall construction to the left of the wetlands area and Falklands Drive has also gone on at a pace. Catching up with those who are prividing the wall's concrete foundation. This towpath wall, as it approaches Falklands Drive, must now deviate from it's original line and follow the adjacent fields fencing. The old path used to be part of the now redundant, and in fact totally disappeared, lock 20 at this point. When the new towpath reaches Falklands Drive grass margin it will take a sharp right hand bend and follow the road on towards the future railway tunnels.
Tony C has this month been able to almost complete the new wetlands board-walk. There still remains the construction of the two mini islands that will conect it together to be done. It's all coming together nicely. Tony G and Steve W continue to reshape the area that will eventually become a 'Turning Pound'. where the canal will negotiate a sharp right hand turn alongside Falklands Drive towards the Cross City railway lines and the proposed tunnels scheduled for next year. These two also deserve thanks for keeping all our machinery and equipment in good working order.
The sandbag wall alongside the Walsall raIway line is gaining height steadily. It's a team effort between those filling the sandbags with a sand/cement mix and placing the bags. Why is it taking so long to build? Well, for each row of bags it takes about 50 bags. That's a lot of bags to fill tie the end and place. The record to date is about 200 bags in a day between three of us.
Thanks also to Peter B for the time he has spent with us lately. We now have wooden pegs all over the site, some yellow, some red. and some green, and even a few blue for good measure. Each colour indicating a particular feature, be it a wall, a path, a level, you name , there is a peg for it. Hope we don't get them mixed up! Thanks again to all our volunteers for their time and effort. We still need more volunters, so try a little 'press ganging, on your friends and neighbours, to try and ger our numbers growing again.
Hugh Millington
