Hare Hill's field drains 22 April 2012

Seven volunteers turned out on a wet morning to continue work on the systems that drain the park land around the Hare hill garden. Naturally / historically this area was quite boggy, but a network of ditches and later culverts drained the excess water allowing good pasture and trees to grow. Being underground the culverts were then forgotten until they failed and trees stated dying 5-10 years ago. Since then most of the problems have been dug up and sorted by various groups including ours. Some sections have of course presented greater challenges than others- and this is one of them.

A fairly large drain/culvert draining a flattish area between the lake and the gardens was at some stage replaced or repaired with a plastic pipe.  Only traces of the original culvert remain.  The section upstream of the plastic pipe is working well - then it hits the blocked plastic section and comes to the surface like a spring.

It then runs along a dug channel to the top of a bank before finding its own way down into a small valley, dropping suddenly into the bottom of the original culvert that we revealed on previous session.  The bottom end of blocked plastic pipe is about 2 feet down from the slab in the picture.

It continues down a slope running along the bottom of the original culvert (stone slabs)

- until the slope levels off in the bottom of the small valley. At this point the situation was very boggy - with it finding its way along the surface through grass and weeds over a wide area. We cut a new trench through this boggy section - about the depth of a spade blade and two spades wide directing the water straight though to the pit giving access to the top of the next section of working old culvert.

Shortly after we completed the new section of trench the pit down to the old downstream culvert started filling - it was not clear if this was due to increased flow from the rain, increased flow from our work, or the downstream culvert blocking as a result of debris from our work. As we had left the drain rods on the Ranger's vehicle we couldn't rod out the section in question - so that had to be left for another day. We had taken our coffee break in the gardeners "snug" and some volunteers went back there for lunch. We left a little earlier than usual just as the hail started!