Friday evening, 6.55pm and NJF pulled up in a cloud of smoke at Waterloo, a swift break to recover from Rick turning up EARLY and a quick change of driver we headed off to places North. Leaving the station Sal found that she couldn’t drink and hump at the same time hence Martin was asked to (speed) hump slower in future. After a very smooth run up to Stoke-on-Trent we pulled into the pub at the unheard of hour of 10pm, scaring the many other people who had turned up already. This was always going to be a big dig, lots of recruits from camps and other regulars as well. We finally crawled back from the pub quite late and found a group of people playing some weird numbers based game in the accom, well it kept them amused! Bed called very late that night, but we did have bunks!

Saturday and Harri T did us proud with a fine cooked breakfast and we headed off to site. MKP did his “in charge” bit leading us on a magical mystery tour and detailing the jobs to be done, most of which required waiting for kit/materials. One of the major jobs for the weekend was to find the edges of the basin below the lock; no one seems to know what the layout is! Up on lock 1 or 14 or 16, (we don’t know which it is!) we started to excavate the new path along the lockside, after lunch Marcus took over the path job and started to lay roadstone. A major job for the morning was cleaning off the stonework in the lock chamber, the major problem with this being the foot of water in most of the lock! Meanwhile Ade, Rupert and Sal took NJF to collect the lime mortar, wheelbarrows and a mixer from various places around the county. The afternoon saw a team being set to dig behind the copping stones that had been pushed out by tree roots, after much digging and additional tea breaks to allow for rain Richard and I managed to acro 5 of the stones back into line. Nina, Gav and Adrian were also setting the woodwork up on the railway siding and Tenco and Alison spent most of the day up trees with chainsaws.

Crawling back to the accom after site, we had to endure the ensuing fun and games of non-working showers and variable sex toilets; this was all eclipsed by a great meal delivered by Jude and Co’s catering team. Another expedition to the pub (only 1.1 miles away according to the sign!) where we soon managed to take over both ends of the main bar leaving only the centre area for the locals. Several pints later and a rather suicidal walk dodging the local drivers we made it back to the accom and another round of the numbers game was played while the rest of us enjoyed a port/beer on the veranda.

Sunday: Harri T cooked breakfast AGAIN, Natalie just about managed to find the accom after driving around the county for half an hour, apparently she was the only person to request good weather and that’s why it was sunny all day! On site things seemed a lot smoother as we had all the materials and everyone knew the jobs. The last of the coping stones were acro’ed into position and while the pointing team swung into action in the ankle deep sludge, an interesting lime-and-roadstone concrete mix was used to fill the gaps behind the stones. Marcus’s path team were going great guns managing to loose an entire lorry load of roadstone in one day, meanwhile the Railway Recovery Group (otherwise known as Gav, Adrian, Rick B and Nina) were laying sleepers and roadstone on the railway siding. With the weather being so much better the ice cream shop did a brisk trade at tea break, the honey and ginger ice cream can be well recommended. We finally managed to tidy up and leave site by 4.30pm, a quick tidy of the accom and we were off back home, stopping briefly in Uttoxeter for diesel and McDonalds.

Many thanks to Tunji for organising the dig and to MKP for organising the site work; this was certainly one of the larger London WRG digs I have been on for a while (we had almost 30 people!) and was great fun for it. This was definitely a very civilised dig with beds in the accom, a teashop and toilets on site and taps in the site hut!

Ed Walker