Leila's post (Digging drains!)

I’m Leila, one of the rangers who work in the North Lakes with Roy.  I’m an Academy Ranger, which means I’m one of ten trainees taken on by the Trust every year to learn everything there is to know about rangering and I was lucky enough to get placed here.

This week the National Trust Volunteer group from Yorkshire came up for their twice-yearly visit to Borrowdale.  With fourteen enthusiastic volunteers on their way we needed a big enough job for them to tackle, and we had just the thing – a particularly muddy section of path and a cunning plan to fix it…

The path is downslope from the road and every time it rains water runs down onto it forcing people off the path to get round, the answer was to put in a side drain and culvert and resurface the path.

This requires a lot of gravel and the day before the volunteers arrived was spent carting materials to site.

The Volunteers arrived on Saturday morning braced for rain but keen to get started.

Getting started

The drain is essentially a ditch filled with chunky gravel that allows water to flow through between the gravel stones while preventing leaves and other debris from falling in and causing blockages. It needed to run the length of the footpath from where the water washes in at the top all the way to the culvert at the bottom – about 70 m! But everyone got stuck in and the ditch quickly began to take shape:

Half way there

At the other end a pipe culvert needed to go in to channel water out of the drain and away from the path.

Ranger Andy explains how to build the culvert

Culvert in progress

Once the ditch was dug out we needed to fill it with gravel. Such a long drain required a lot of toing and froing with wheelbarrows.

The pile of gravel soon went down and after the arrival of the second trailer load the ditch was filled.

On the second day the path was finished off with lots more wheelbarrowing of gravel to cover the surface of the path. 

The before and after pictures - a vast improvement!

We are very grateful to all the volunteers for their help, in fact they worked so hard they finished early and took to the nearby path from Kettlewell Car Park with loppers to clear back vegetation!

So once again huge thanks are due to our Yorkshire volunteers who did another fantastic job for us.