Since the last update we have continued working at Fosseway Lane, building gabion baskets and a stepped wall on top of them. The intention is to create a sloped path from the road down to the towpath.
Although the walls were no more than six bricks high we still incorporated a small buttress in the centre of the wall on the path side. These will eventually be covered with backfill material and not be seen.
We don’t have any trained bricklayers on our team, so when the Waterway Recovery Group held their summer training weekend in Lichfield, both Dave and I booked onto the half-day bricklaying course. But no matter how good a trainer is, they can only teach you the very basics on a four-hour course.
We were joined by a bricklaying student on work experience for a few days in June, but other than that Dave has been building the walls, fresh from his four-hours of training.
In early June, Rick ‘the brick’ (our master bricklayer) came to see how we were getting on and we asked him if he would lay the top course of blue bricks. These are the most difficult because you can very easily stain them with excess mortar.
The path from the road (Fosseway Lane) needs to be wide enough so that plant and equipment can access the site (and lock 18) so we fitted a 10’ gate and a pedestrian ‘kissing gate’.
With the wall completed, we started backfilling it with sand, before laying a membrane and gravel top layer, thus the completed sloped path emerges.
Over the last week of July and the first week of August, the Waterway Recovery Group has two weeks of summer camp at Fosseway, erecting sheet piling on the south wall. The sheets, waling beams and anchor piles were delivered and it took a couple of hours to offload them.
Mike Babb
Workparty volunteer
First published in Cut Both Ways August edition
