As I write this blog charting our work parties progress over the last six weeks or so the high temperatures that we have been faced with seem all but a distant memory. Even at 8.00am in a morning it was 20 degrees centigrade and reached ‘silly’ temperatures of over 30 degrees by early afternoon. It has been difficult to work in those sorts of temperatures, but we have carried on, where we could. Consequently, we have probably made smaller levels of progress over the last month or so but we have managed to proceed on a number of fronts at Tamworth Road.
Firstly, some progress with the North wall, which has been rather static over the last couple of months, because we had reached the first of three inspection Chambers on the ‘big pipe’. This month the team have managed to effectively integrate the front wall of the inspection chamber into the new north wall and to complete the soldier courses atop of the new wall. For a short while it did look like we had constructed a replica WWII pillbox, as the photograph below shows, but the following day a final course of bricks sealed up the chamber once more.
Mike Babb
Within the former lock chamber we continued to cast a new floor and came across both the old lock 24 invert and also the remains of the centre supporting brick buttress of the locks south wall.
Across on the new South Wall Roger has continued to extend it, thanks to an almost continuous source of imported and cleaned bricks by Bill. There is now a plan to add an intermediate intersecting wall on the towpath. It will join up with the higher-level path. We need to do this because as we pass the cottage there simply isn’t the width to have the towpath at the level of the canal and grade it back up to the adjacent land level. So, a wall at 1 in 16 will join up with the current path, level with the cottage, and mean that we won’t have to excavate quite so much soil either. Once past the cottage we will need to get the path back down to canal height again as we will have to fit mooring rings on the approach to the new lock 24, which will be just after Cricket Lane.
Meanwhile the former historic by-wash has continued to pose a further integration
challenge. The plan has been to underpin the corner with concrete. Rick then
tidied up the brickwork which would originally have been below ground and
added a bit of brickwork to cover the concrete buttress before Hughs dry-stone
wall covers up the bottom section of concrete pier. We also plan to break out the
bricks sealing the former by-wash pipe, so that as you walk down the towpath the
average adult will be at the correct height to see in through the hole – to the three
arches previously constructed by Rick and the original weir wall. This will certainly
create a talking point for future boaters who will no doubt be confused as to its
original design purpose.
Elsewhere there has been the usual summer projects - attempting to stem nature’s challenge - the growth of bracken, gorse and blackberry threatens to reclaim the areas of towpath and canal sections not currently in water. Members of both Plant Maintenance and Work Party teams have supplemented the ‘Green Team’ at various locations over August.
Mike Babb
A short video of Bill cleaning up old bricks... and what they're for.
If you could help with this tedious but very worthwhile task please contact Volunteering@lhcrt.org.uk
A small team has been involved in pre-construction work at Darnford Moor, in order to facilitate access for future site survey (topographic) and ground investigation works. We’ll have more news on this soon.
