HARDY volunteers from the Shropshire Union Canal Society braved freezing temperatures to ensure Montgomery Canal restoration work stayed on course.
They managed to continue their work at Crickheath despite frozen ground preventing them from hedge planting and managed to clear a sizeable stretch of vegetation as part of the restoration plan.
Tom Fulda, restoration project manager, said: “With temperatures down to -7C overnight, ‘bonfire management’ was a popular activity.
“Clearance is the first step in restoration and, looking to the (not too distant) future, scrub and more than 2000 sizeable saplings were cleared from 170 metres of channel west of Schoolhouse Bridge.
“Aided by the desire to keep warm, the felling rate was relentless. There were heroic efforts by relays of volunteers to haul the material along the towpath to the bonfire site and for others to keep up with feeding the material on to the fire. No one felt the cold!”
Work at the site is progressing rapidly, and the group expects to relocate from the Crickheath compound to a compound site by Schoolhouse Bridge later this year. Apart from channel clearance, further preparation activity took place in the form of improving access to this compound for larger delivery vehicles. The ramp from the road was substantially improved by widening and reducing the gradient.
Back towards the Crickheath end of the site, work to profile the channel continued. Due to the prevailing ground conditions and topography, the channel for this project is lined in some areas and unlined in others. A further 80 metres of channel, in addition to the areas completed last year, requires lining and profiling the channel in this area was started. Once the thick crust of frozen ground was broken through this proved relatively straightforward.
Just before Christmas, the stop planks at Crickheath Bridge were cracked open allowing the water level in Phase 1A by Crickheath Wharf to equalise with the navigable waterway at Crickheath Basin.
