Autumn is well under way now and we need to get on with maintenance and repairs. Part of this involves the paths that go up and down our various hills and banks. We recently had a delivery of wood chip from South Glos so for the work party last Sunday 10th November we used some of it to repair steps. I went down to the woods a few days before to check on the leaky dams we'd built a few weeks ago only to find that the stream had almost completely dried up and there was no water behind them at all As I was there, I walked around to see how things were looking in general and found that ...
... the flight of steps going down from post 6 to the bridge needs some care and attention.
And four of the steps had been removed completely then thrown into the scrub alongside the path.
The first job was to put some wood chip into bags and carry them up the valley path and along to the steps near post 6. We moved a lot of wood chip, there's loads more around the corner at the top as well as the bags you can see here. In particular, Andy put in a tremendous amount of work shifting the chip.
Then Erika, Graham, Andy and Rob began the repairs to install the steps that had been moved ...
... and spread wood chip on them to level off the front edges.
The rest of the steps down down to the bridge were dealt with, then we crossed over and spread more wood chip to level the steps on that side of the stream.
This job was finished off - Graham is checking that it was done properly! It was a good morning's work and we achieved a lot.