From the site of the old Lock 19 the canal will take a new route alongside Falkland Road, under Claypit Lane and on to Birmingham Road. This area is the focus of most work during 2021.
OpenStreetMap View Larger Map
2021 - Slow start due to another lockdown
January 2021 With lockdown once again in effect mostly only emergency work and maintenance is being done. All work is being carried out following strict COVID-secure guidelines.
Emergency Remedial Work
Pausing construction works can cause unintended outcomes. Rainwater running down a temporary slope causes erosion of the surface material and then potholes and ruts. So we have had to urgently add more in-fill material to reinstate a stable pathway. We need to keep it safe for the ever increasing number of people using Fosseway for their personal exercise and dog walking.
We had a minor collapse of the bank because when we stopped the brickwork, we unwittingly stopped next to a redundant service trench. (We are reliably informed that this area was the temporary contractors' compound for the now redundant railway bridge scheme and is made-up ground.) We had to quickly support it with sandbags and pour an underpinning slab. We will also carry out further precautionary remedial works in the near future.
Closing the gap
We continued the brickwork to close the gap in the Fosseway basin. We really need to get it completed so we can open the footpath fully over the top. This will create the second circular route for the many walkers who use the site.
Work is being carried out following COVID-secure guidelines.
Over the next few months we have continued the towpath along the road side of Falkland Road once the brick soldier courses had been added to top off the wall. This almost completes the work in Section 'A' with just bit more sheet piling to add to the field side and its towpath to also be topped out. We also started to fix the sponsored tags from the Piling Tags appeal to the piles.
Meanwhile, much of our efforts were directed at Old Lock 24 - more on that elsewhere.
You can see the ones we have done so far on the website here.
The next phase begins
The next section along Falkland Road is an area called Section 'B' and is not yet in the ownership of the Trust. The Council had previous difficulties with Traveller incursions onto other sections of their land and so were worried that the Trust would have reduced powers to move them on and so asked us to build a low-level earth bund wall along the remaining road side of Falkland Road and Claypit Lane.
The low-level bund wall work was completed over March and April. In late March sections of the bund were subsequently planted with hedging (donated by South Staffs Water) and kept well-watered.
We lost count of the number of starlings that congregated on our earthworks to take mouthfuls of worms back to their chicks.
They got very close to the machines in order to get early access to recently excavated earth.
April - An Environmental Bund
The landscape along Falkland Road changed dramatically at the end of March. We’ve created a new environmental bund along the roadside and have started planting a hedgerow along the top of the bund. The hedging has been sponsored by South Staffs Water, through its PEBBLE Fund – Projects that Explore Biodiversity Benefits in the Local Environment. We received a grant of around £2,300 which will pay for the hedging all the way to Claypit Lane.
.Pete Aspley and Caroline Cooper, directors from South Staffs Water, came along to help us plant the first 100 hedging whips and Caroline said: “We want to protect and enhance the environment for our customers, communities and for future generations. Our PEBBLE fund aims to do that, by supporting existing community groups and charities, which are already working hard to increase the variety of natural living things. Hedges provide important ecosystems, as well as shelter and protection for other plants and animals, so we’re really happy to be supporting the canal trust’s project.”
May - More planting and some jobs completed.
The bank bund wall was finally grassed with material stripped from the adjacent area and the completed bund is already growing well on the road side and will provide habitat for a range of small species.
Read more on the bund and the planting on our news page here.
The last couple of jobs that we did in Fosseway, were to complete the towpath across the back of the basin wall (thus creating a circular walking route around Fosseway). Early afternoon standing on our access ramp on the top of the basin wall and its amazing to look down the Fosseway towards Wood Lock 18 and see just how many walkers, joggers and even cyclists are using this site now.
We have also done a bit of tidying up, mainly because of an arson attack on a couple of our waste storage bins. So we tidied the area and disposed of several tonnes of unusable waste material as well.
The last job that we have done is to change the layout of our storage compound to make it far easier to get the machines in and out when we eventually start the serious work of relocating several thousand tonnes of earth from the remaining section of Falkland Road going up to Claypit Lane – moving the spoil into the area between the canal and railway line, next to our compound.
Wood Lock 18
At the AGM on June 4th, following the formal business, a video was shown in honour of our President and founder Eric Wood. Henceforth, Lock 18 will be known as 'Wood Lock 18'.
See the special birthday tribute to Eric Wood here
The video also included some memories of others who were there, or almost, at the start, particularly of Lock 18 which was the first major part to be restored. The video ended with a birthday presentation to Eric who will be 90 in a few days time.
A Birds Eye View
Summer - Autumn
Most of our effort was expended elsewhere during the second half of 2021 so it was relatively quiet at Fosseway. Nature took it's course and the new planting all thrived.
The Taylor Wimpey housing development (known as Friary Meadow at the Shires) grew rapidly and Claypit Lane was remodeled.
Behind the scenes much planning and paperwork was required. We are told that the Papers to release the next parcel of land for Section 'B' are complete and listed for the next Council Committee in August. Let’s hope it all goes through and we can start on the next section in a few months time.
More Tags were attached to the sheet steel piling until the end of the present piling was reached.
December
There can be very few benefits of excavating a canal channel and thence leaving the area cleared but not in water. However, one benefit occurred at Darnford in that it became an ideal place for pioneering silver birch seeds to blow into the recently cleared channel from the adjacent parkland and for trees to then self-seed. It was amazing how fast the trees took hold of their new ground, the channel bed seeming providing shelter from the worst of the elements and encouraging rapid growth. In Autumn this year however, the trees had become a bit too large, they could not remain in the canal channel, but nor were they going to be wasted and therefore nearly two dozen of the largest were carefully dug out from the channel and relocated.
They are now on Falkland Road, planted at 10 metre intervals some 2 metres from the road and will hopefully provide a bit of ‘interest’ on an otherwise uninteresting perimeter bund wall. The 22 silver birch trees would only have gotten us about a third of the way down this final section of Falkland Road, but luckily they weren’t the only trees planted.
A kind financial donation from Lichfield u3a, which is a UK-wide movement of locally run interest groups providing learning and leisure activities for retired people, meant that a further fifteen trees could be purchased from a local garden centre. It felt a bit strange when we started constructing the bund along the final section of Falkland Road between Birmingham Road and Claypit Lane (an area we call Zone C).
On the first section we were leaving gaps for the trees to be subsequently planted but on this section the trees were already in place and so we were constructing the bund wall either side of them.
It would have been a difficult job to strip the turves a form the 600mm high and one metre wide bund but we hired a petrol driven turf cutter again and it made the job of cutting the turves a lot easier. They just then had to be cut to length, rolled up and placed on the bund wall.
There was some assistance from the DoE’s on the first Saturday and by the end of the week before Christmas we had collectively managed to complete around 50 metres. Hedging whips will eventually be planted along the top of the bund. Peter was out on the Wednesday before Christmas and planted out the first 10 metres or so.
Over the Christmas period in 2021 an estimated 2,400 tonnes of spoil which had been dug out from Gallows Reach & Gallows Wharf was moved from alongside Tamworth Road to Fosseway were it will be used to bulk up the lowland heathland area. The opportunity was also taken to partly dig out the canal channel up toward Cricket Lane. Many thanks to our friends Adam Westwood and Chasetown Civil Engineering who have loaned us excavators for the job. For more details it is probably best to watch the video where Peter Buck explains all.
