Supporting Groundwork with Track Maintenance

Once again there is a complete lack of photos to illustrate the full extent of our activities at last Monday's work day. My fault entirely, sorry for that failing!!

Anyway, a really enthusiastic bunch of White Peak Sustrans Rangers rather dominated the numbers of other regular volunteers of the Groundwork team, led by Marion Farrell. As well as David and Catherine the group also included David S, Brian and our latest recruit Jenni Ebbrell from Ashbourne (plus me). In addition we had two prospective recruits from Warslow and we hope to welcome John, Ian and possibly Doug too into our ranger numbers early in the New Year.

The weather was fantastic but after a heavy frost those tasked with removing leaves off the boardwalk section of track just south of Rowsley found that big clumps of wet vegetation were well and truly frozen to the planks. It was very hard work to get them off but by the end of the session much progress had been made and the cycle track pretty well clear of leaves. It is good to see that DCC has substantially replaced the broken planks, but how long it will be before others become damaged, we'll have to wait and see.

Individually, and in small groups, we worked closely with other members of the assembled team and found that a number of them also had a keen interest in cycling. John and Caroline from Cressbrook are particularly keen to think about becoming Sustrans rangers and so we were able to carry out some informal recruitment activity as we sawed and lopped our way along the verges of NCR680. This was a section of track  we have spent quite a lot of time working on earlier in the year but Marion certainly feels as though it has a lot of interesting wildlife and fauna habitats that she wants us to develop. It was wonderful to see so many people (cyclists and walkers) using the trail

Further sessions will be required in the New Year. Monday 3 February has been proposed.

Thanks to all for a pretty intense morning of quite heavy work, but the bright sun, blue skies and convivial spirit (not to mention double helping of chocolate biscuits) all made it into a very enjoyable experience.

David and Catherine did go onto look again at the possibility of an alternative route at the start of NCR548 near Hartington. Unfortunately it is too complex a problem for a ready solution and so we will defer that task until next year. Thanks to them both for diverting round to look at the issue.