Saturday 28th December 2013

The plan was to give the hard working Broadway Volunteers  a 10 days break over  Christmas and the New Year, but a few of the die-hards were having none of it and decided to come in on Saturday. I got back from a family wedding in darkest Cornwall yesterday, and Jo kindly filed the following report with a couple of pictures:-

I don’t know if you can post from deepest Cornwall, but there were 6 of us on site today.

Robin and Peter K were cleaning bricks

Vic did his usual half day gardening, and dug out two concrete fence posts, formerly part of the low wall that is being replaced by genuine Cotswold stone

Marguerite and Vic......

John Blofield, who tied the banners back on and re-erected the Heras fence that had blown down

Ron Taylor and myself on the dumper.

Going to start the dumper, I noticed that the cutting towards Springfield Lane was in early bloom, with big yellow patches to the left and right all the way down to the bridge. On closer inspection, these turned out to be about 20 Fairview dumpy bags, that had been blown way down the site by the storm. We collected them all, and put a small RSJ on top of the pile. The rest of the site seems to have survived +/- OK, including the brickies’ shelter, still upright albeit a bit askew.

The combined efforts of Peter K and Ron finally got the dumper going, and Ron and I went down to the Mythe pile, and retrieved a dumper load of mixed bricks – there are none left on the surface to find now – two dumper loads of Cotswold stone, which we took to Vic’s flower bed, and one load of abutment cap stones. We now have two pallets of these. We then picked up Vic’s two concrete posts and took them down the site to join the first two, and finally cleared the 3 dumpy bags he had filled with flower bed debris.

Ron sorting the Cotswold Stone.....

The signal box site looks fine, with no damage. The brook was flowing well.

Marguerite was busy today, with a pleasing number of visitors. We also chatted up two potential new volunteers.

Jim H called in, after a day ‘on the cushions’. We also received a delegation from the Mid-Hants, who inspected our site before having a ride from Toddington.

See you again soon,

Best regards,

Jo