A change of scene
With the peak of the tourist season soon to be upon us we’ve left the busy scree slopes of Cat Bells behind for now in exchange for this wooded retreat in the oceanic woodlands of Borrowdale.
We will return to Cat Bells in the coming months but the seasonal popularity of the mountain slows the pace of our work and creates a work site with too many hazards.
Pitching while the sun shines
Hitching the trailer onto the back of our beloved Land Rover I have a moment of nostalgia, it’s been a few months since we’ve been out with a couple of tonnes of stone in tow and I’ve missed it. New project, new stone, new techniques and I’m excited.
The stone we’re using is from the Helvellyn washouts of 2015’s storm Desmond. We load two tonnes of stone by hand onto a tipping trailer, driving as far as we can up the track we then unload onto our trusty quad bike to ferry smaller loads the rest of the way. I’m sure we’d have been the laughing stock of the miners that used to frequent this route, ferrying stone back up towards the quarry!
There’s nothing better than sticking your spade into the earth and finding no hidden boulders or bedrock beneath to jar your wrists. We were spared that luxury on this project and were soon grunting and sweating, lifting old cobbles out of the road before fitting our new holding stones (the stones at the bottom of the pitching).