With It being Friday 13th I set off to the Basingstoke canal with some trepidation – surprisingly the journey came off without a hitch. At the almost unheard of time of 8.30pm I met up with Pete, Dippy Claire and Marcus (who required much straightening out after four hours in Beastie). With the Scouts in residence in the hall the only answer was to head to the pub! While Pete detailed the work for the weekend the rest of London WRG dribbled in by car, train and minibus (well only Andy (Sal’s) and Martin – the smallest number in the bus ever?) The pub ran out of real beer by about 10 so we started making inroads into the Guinness.

The next day started earlyish – many jokes were made about the dig leader, me, being last out of bed. A good breakfast courtesy of Maria and a wave of navvies headed to site. The work for the weekend was to be on the old Brookwood Mental Hospital site (a case of the inmates returning voluntarily to the asylum?) that has now been turned into a country park. The main jobs were to be constructing a disabled access ramp and removal of the old boundary fence – this was to help with the running of a campaign rally on the site next year.

So while Moose lead a team off to find the fence that required trashing (NWPG had started the work previously) Marcus, Martin, Pete and I hunted for the “obvious” path crossing the ditch that we had to bridge. This being the Basingstoke the bridge would involve burying pipes. After a good half-hour’s wandering round we decided that an existing bridge was in the right place but would need a lot of work to make it disabled person rated. So the pipes went back in the van, Andy “Kate”, David Miller, Dippy Claire, Rick A and Jon G started to make concrete bags while Marcus directed Andy (Sal’s) in the excavator. By tea break 1 tonne of ballast had been turned into concrete bags, the outline of a ramp was developing and Moose’s team had stripped all the chain link fence from the fence posts.

Around tea break James the Postie arrived with his Land Rover. Having a Tirfor in the back he was assigned to pulling (posts), unfortunately the Tirfor refused to pull despite 5 people peering at its insides. So after lunch the Land Rover was pressed into use as a surrogate tirfor, which worked very well and kept James amused for the rest of the weekend.

By lunch a further tonne of concrete bags had been made and most of the ramp layout had been done, designing done and altered on the fly. With concrete bags forming the edges of the ramp, Andy was dispatched to a spoil heap found by Pete that would provide the three or four dumper loads of earth Marcus needed for the path. By the end of the day four dumper loads had been delivered by Sleepy Dave and the spoil heap (which turned out to be the local kids bike ramps) had been reprofiled to order. The fence pulling team had developed their methodology and were going great guns – so much so that we managed to tire out Hurricane Bob, temporarily renamed “Light Breeze Bob”.

Back at the accom and a small team started to undercoat the new Stihl saw and bow saw boxes made by Marcus, everyone else seemed to collapse on their beds! Dinner was Maria’s signature scrumpy and paprika stew with “death at five paces” garlic bread. People were still so tired after dinner (Bob headed home for a shower and a soft bed) that we only just made it down the local pub where the real ale had been restored.

Sunday, much like Saturday but quicker – Bob arrived much later than the previous day, we must have tired him out! We were on site by 8.45am though and with Sal taking Andy’s place in the excavator (some excuse about a niece’s birthday party) and Tim and Martin off at the WRG meeting, it was a smaller team than the previous day. So while David Miller and Sal got on with shifting the last four dumper loads of spoil to make up the access ramp, the fencing team made a start on the 42 remaining posts (Yep, James counted them!). By lunch Pete had arrived with the tug and barge for us to load the posts into, the last of the fence post had been pulled and the ramp had had two tonnes of ballast applied. After lunch Marcus and co put the finishing layer of 40-to-dust over the ramp and gave it a final wacker plating. The fence pullers started to transport the posts back to the barge – using a Land Rover of course! With the excavator finally free of loading duties I took over and loaded the posts into the skips in the boat – only managing to loose one into the canal!

By 5pm everyone was tired and we headed back to the accom and home. Proving that Didcot is the centre of the universe, GCW’s route home involved meeting Martin and Andy at my flat before they headed back to London.

Many thanks to everyone who worked very hard over the weekend, whether they were shovelling soil/ballast/concrete/roadstone or digging out fence posts – we filled two skips with fence posts and a lot more were left behind. The local OAP’s were very impressed with the new access ramp – it makes a nice change to build something completely in a weekend! Thanks to Nigel’s son Chris for coming on his first weekend – apparently we haven’t put him off and he’ll be back!