Meeting up in the Bleak House pub on Friday night it was obvious that it was going to be a large dig, with twelve Londoners and an equivalent number of KESCRG’ites. The work was to be doing the final landscaping and fence replacement on lock three of the Woodham flight after the two canal camps had repaired the bywash pipe and to determine the cause of a leak on the lock ten bywash.

Saturday morning arrived and the work was split approximately along group lines with KESCRG drawing the landscaping while London took on the task of finding the leak at lock ten. Not actually being on site on the Saturday I can’t report exactly on what went on but a leak on the upper wing wall was found and fixed by digging out the washed out ground and puddling clay into the resulting hole. Digging round the bywash inspection chamber also showed up a major leak which was to be Sunday’s main task.

Saturday’s evening meal proved to be one of Maureen’s brilliant roasts and on retiring to the Bleak House we found that as the landlord was leaving the next day he had secured an extended license for the evening, this was well received by all concerned and we proceeded to wipe out all the real ale in the bar!

Sunday proved to be more of the same work as Saturday, on draining the pound above lock ten it was found that a large hole at the base of the wing wall was probably the cause of the leak and probing with a wrecking bar behind the wall showed that a five foot hole would be needed before puddling could be started. So while the hole in the wing wall was clayed up by Clive, the rest of the motley team took shifts at digging out the hole and getting the clay we would need to seal it up again. The afternoon was spent puddling and filling in the test holes left over from Saturday, once we had finished it was hard to see that a weekends work had been done on site, typical! Seriously though it looked as if the work had stopped the leak, as there was no sign of water upon refilling the pound.

Comment from the dig, overheard from the puddling team “Can we have a small hippo as a pet, it would be ideal for this job”

Ed Walker