Hare Hill 4 Sept 2011

Six of our volunteers met up with two locals, and another group - the Sale and Altrincham conservation volunteers and spent the day in the parkland surrounding Hare Hill Garden.

We were returning to a land drain that we had previously visited I think in May 2009 - though as this drain was is particularly deep and very well blocked it more or less defeated us on that occasion. This time a local farmer had been recruited to remove the top 4 feet or so of soil. This had created a series of trenches along the line of the drain. So in theory we only had to dig down one to two feet - naturally we discovered the drain was not straight and it dissappeared out of the side of the trench so we did have to dig one pit to the full depth by hand.

In the first photgraph - you can see water flowing along the base of the trench this is above the level of the drain. It then dispears into a section of drain that wasn't completely blocked by mud. Looking the otherway in the second photo a little later (the stones flat in the mud are where the gentleman was standing in the first photo) - the drain has been uncovered, opened, and cleaned out. The trench has also been made wider to get at more of the drain. Standing in the trench is a T bar that allows you to find the drain without digging it up - so long as it isn't too deep, and behind the bucket is a hand dug pit that allowed us to get at the next blockage a little further downstream.

By the end of the day water was flowing along the entire section (these photos only show about 1/5 of the length uncovered). Though there was still a partial blockage under the piles of grass covered soil in the background of the second photo.