Work Party Report

Athina Beckett, Work Party Organiser

I am writing this report in the last week of February, with just a few more work parties at Cosgrove before we move to our summer site at Buckingham. Now according to Canalboat magazine (see March edition and ‘Keeping you in the Dark' on the right) I've been a bit of a slave driver making you work into the night!

Seriously, I think we have achieved an awful lot since we started on the A5 site in October. The work has also been quite hard considering that we first had to contend with some very prickly bushes and trees and in the last couple of months it has been mainly tirforing work most of which has been done by our own work parties whereas in the past we have called upon WRG to help us with tirforing jobs.

The last Sunday work party at Cosgrove, which is on Sunday 10th March, will be the Whitbread Action Earth day hopefully with the extra publicity we may get more volunteers and Whitbreads are donating £50 towards the purchase of new tools.

On Thursday 21st March a company called Middlemarch is doing an Environmental Impact Study for us. This has been funded by the society, costing just under £1,000. The next step in our restoration plan will be a full engineering feasibility study costing in the region of £l0,000. So if anybody has any suggestion or ideas as to how we raise this amount please let me or another committee member know, because once we have had this very important study completed we can move on to what I think most people would consider the most important - getting the canal in water!

As I said at the beginning of this article, in April the work parties move to our site at Buckingham where we should be able to finish clearing the canal bed and then onto the next job of re-building the spillweir. Once this has been re-built we are then very close to getting this section in water.

A big thanks to all the new people who have helped with the work parties in the last few months and to all those members who have supported us for many years.