OUR VOLUNTEERS BRAVE THE STORM

Despite storm Arwen doing its best to thwart the team at Wappenshall, great progress was made once again. Overnight the large willow tree in our neighbour’s garden had two large limbs blown off it and most of these landed on the wharf side. This necessitated a good 90 minutes of work to cut away the branches to enable the JCB to reach the remaining spoil. In bitterly cold north winds the bricklaying team managed to lay almost two more courses on the right hand half of the new retaining wall. Also, the re-established towpath from the skew bridge was cleared of vegetation and marked out ready for new stone to be put in and compressed. As a safety measure, a new protective barrier was constructed to prevent volunteers from falling into the basin when using the whacker plate to vibrate the towpath stone into place. In addition, we prepared further basin slabs ready for concreting next week. We now have 6 levelled, shuttering installed, plus polythene liner, support rings and mesh in place. When these 6 are concreted, we just have the last 14 to concrete from a total of 101!