This was my first attempt at organising a dig for about three years, and by Friday evening you could tell I’d been losing my touch. For starters, we didn’t make it to the pub – mainly because there isn’t one within easy walking distance of Sleaford Rugby Club. There was also a spot of bother with the keys: I arranged for one of the Sleaford locals to turn up at the club and hand them over to Chris and Lynne (new volunteers, recruited on the Sleaford camp) who were going to be there early… but I didn’t tell said volunteers that they were going to be picking up the keys… and they then found that they couldn’t get there till Saturday… and by the time they told me, the local chap had been waiting at the Rugby Club for two hours…

Anyway eventually all of us got there (except Chris and Lynne), met the locals, had a few bottles of beer, admired Ed’s new Discovery (that’s a kind of Land Rover by the way – Ed hasn’t just found the source of the Nile, or become the first white man to set foot in the legendary land of Shangri La), watched the cricket on the telly (!) and went to bed.

Saturday saw us heading eastwards to South Kyme village, followed by a half-mile drive across the fields (so Ed got to go off-roading in his Discovery… but then so did I in my Morris Traveller…) to a rather low and decidedly elderly-looking Bailey Bridge across a cutting containing the weedy channel of the River Slea. Our job for the weekend was to raise this bridge by about a foot, so that more boats could fit under it. The locals had a Plan (and one of them had been involved the last time the bridge was raised 15 years ago) so after an appropriate period of standing about looking at it, we raised one end up using jacks and Acrow props, then removed several of the old railway sleepers that formed the deck so that we could get in and start digging out a foundation trench for the new supports. We also made a start on landscaping the earth around the end of the bridge, to bring the ground up to the new level of the deck.

Following several phone calls to ascertain exactly where we were and how to get there, Chris and Lynne surprised everyone by arriving by car across a different field on the opposite side of the river.

Meanwhile a smaller group had been despatched to work on another job: removing enough brambles and other weed growth from around a footbridge to see how badly knackered the bridge was. They removed all the weeds and confirmed that it’s seriously badly knackered.

Oh yes, and some of us listened to the cricket on the radio.

By Saturday evening we’d completed the foundation trench and cast the concrete base, but were having slight concerns about whether we really ought to be raising the other end of the bridge before the first end was actually sitting on its foundations.

Back at the accommodation, we ate an evening meal that probably consisted of some kind of chicken casserole followed by treacle tart. We usually do when I’m cooking (especially when I can’t cook my other recipes of lasagne or spag bol because we’re got a non-pasta-eating non-cooked-cheese-eating person with us) but I can’t remember. I do remember that Sal helped to cook it, and also that a fair amount of wine went into the cooking – which is probably why I can’t remember what I cooked…

Once again we didn’t go to the pub because there still wasn’t one within walking distance (please can we have a van that James can drive?) but we drank some bottles of beer and watched the cricket on the telly.

Sunday morning we played an interesting game called “hunt the non-closed window that’s stopping us from setting the burglar alarms” before heading to site (I managed to (a) run out of petrol and (b) slide the car into the ditch in a single journey – impressive?) where we set about laying the second foundation trench, this time without lifting the bridge first.

Chris and Lynne departed to fetch some concrete blocks that were to be salvaged from a building on local Norman’s farm – unfortunately once they had been salvaged they resembled rubble more than blocks, so they probably wouldn’t have been a great deal of use for supporting several tons of bridge.

Some of us listened to the cricket again… at least until ENGLAND WON at which point appropriate text messages were sent to acquaintances in Australia.

As we had decided that we couldn’t be sure that it was safe to jack up the other end of the bridge, we ran out of work at around lunchtime. However the local Sleaford Navigation Trust folks seemed pleased with what we’d done, and I’ve since heard that a group of them went back a few weeks later and finished the job. So we packed up early and went home.

SNT would like to have us back for another weekend next year. Can we stand another whole weekend without a trip to the pub?

PS apologies for any inaccuracies in the above report. I’m pretty sure that most of the things that I said happened actually did happen. And I’m quite certain that the things I said didn’t happen definitely didn’t (especially us going to the pub). But I’ve described them in the right order, or even on the right day (or possibly on the right dig) I’m not at all sure. Note to self: when writing stroppy editorial columns for Navvies pointing out how much better it is to write camp reports and send them in straight away while it’s fresh in your memory, remember that it applies to me too.

Martin Ludgate