Drainage and tree guard painting at Hare Hill on Sunday 10th July 2016

Five of MNTV’s finest ensured that quality made up for quantity as Adrian, Christine, Jenny, Lisa and Matt turned out on a cloudy morning to carry out two different tasks at Hare Hill.

 

John Mann has made the short trip from Dunham Massey to take up the ranger’s role, and one of his tasks is to identify the many Victorian culverts that run under Hare Hill’s parkland, and find the site of any collapses which he suspects are to blame for some of the site’s drainage problems. We dug down at three points where John had already found collapses, removed the broken stone lids of the culverts and replaced them with large concrete slabs. Hopefully these will bear the weight of the cows that roam freely across the parkland, and are the cause of the previous collapses.

  

Meanwhile we also tried to find the line of a side culvert that could be causing flooding in the garden of one of the old gatehouses. This involved pushing a spike into the ground – this slid in easily where there was just grass, but made a hollow ‘thunk’ where it hit the top of a culvert or drainage pipe. It was a hit and miss process (literally!) and not made easy by the stone backfill that has been thrown in on top of previous works.

 

While the replacement of the concrete slabs went well, we couldn’t follow the side culvert back to its intersection with the main system, as the line started to go too deep under a hilly section and we’d have had to excavate something akin to a hobbit hole to get to the depth of the drain. We all enjoyed our work though – getting into a culvert in some wellies, carrying a spade, is the only thing that Adrian enjoys almost as much as a food break, so by lunchtime he was very happy!

 

Starting work on the tree guards

 

Lunch was taken under threat of a soaking – we had one short sharp shower in the morning, but the afternoon forecast promised much more wet stuff. As it happened, it cleared up and we enjoyed sunshine during our second task, which was to paint some of the tree guards. A bit of gymnastics was needed for those painting the inside of the guards to get in and out without getting themselves covered in green! We managed to do four guards in total, including the one that surrounds the tree we planted in 2008 in memory of our former chairman Jonathan Prance. His tree is flourishing, and its guard now looks the part too.

 

Jonathan's tree guard gets some TLC