Others

Everyone will come across something new

It could be a physical obstacle or a completely mental obstacle involving permissions and regulations.

There are plenty of tales of silly regulations that had to be overcome, but most of them are hopefully unique. Perhaps we need to start compiling the Book of Tales before people forget.

Leaving that type of problem aside, this what we came across not covered by the other pages

Two areas of overgrown woodland. One 100m long and one 70m long. Find an experienced diggerman and get him to do what he can to dig through. He will do better than you expect, his determination will drive him on. Then you do the rest by hand. Bury the lot in alkathene. Remember that pushing orange duct through 100m of outer duct needs plenty of free space. If necessary, work in say 25m sections and make joints. This is where it is useful that 40mm, 32mm and 25mm duct fit just nicely inside each other, so you can use a foot-long collar of the next size up to cover over the join.

We did not have many sections where a digger could not reach. There was one particular steep bank that did have to be hand dug, and a 30m high cliff that had to be abseiled with a spade in one hand.

We had two areas with lots of surface bedrock - limestone pavement with some soil infilling it so that about 25% of the rock was showing above the ground. Wander about with a metal spike to find a route through where there is enough depth. And sections where you can’t get enough depth, backfill with Postcrete cement. Again, you need to choose your diggerman wisely. Choose the one who hates to be beaten.

Footpaths are not exactly an obstacle, but if digging across or near a footpath:

· Keep an eye out for people arriving unexpectedly.

· Pause work and let them through.

· Don’t leave holes overnight.

· Leave a decent pathway when you’ve finished.

Slopes

What angle of slope you can work on obviously affects your route. It depends on what machine you are using, the weather conditions, and the confidence of the driver. You can go down a very steep slope in a tractor, it can be scarily steep, but not a problem and if it is moleploughing at the same time the plough will act as a brake and assist with safety. Going up any sort of slope whilst ploughing is to be avoided if possible, it’s likely just to cause wheelspin and chew things up. So, with an undulating run the plough has to find the best line by contouring when it can to minimise the up-slopes.

A digger is less happy with a serious slope, since it has a less even action. The body of the digger pushes and pulls to counteract the digger bucket action. And whilst it might be possible to trench across a slope, going back to backfill it might be impossible now that it has been made muddier. A section may have to be backfilled by hand. A digger may be able to stretch out and dig some parts of a steep bank from above and below it.

A side slope can be difficult, it is easier with more grip, this means not when it is wet or frosty and ideally when the grass is longer. The machine can easily drift slightly downhill as it makes the traverse, any action to counteract this will just chew the field up. So, you need to consider how this may affect your plans. For example, if you are heading for a far wall, then do not finalise the crossing point until you find out where the machine actually meets the wall. If you have fixed points you are aiming for, then it may be necessary to work from both ends, drifting down to a join in the middle.

This is where you need someone available at short notice to take advantage of the right weather for that field or section.

Trees

Trees are best given a wide berth if possible. Consider a vague rule that the roots go out sideways in all directions to a distance equivalent to the height of the tree. The idea of putting the ducting in round the edges of fields doesn’t work if there are large trees on the boundaries. Apart from the affect on the poor tree it is very difficult to moleplough through large roots. Roots tend to be fairly brittle and are usually no match for a digger, but it makes the job harder and rips the ground up more (and you can’t just tidy the roots away subtly like rocks after you have finished, you might have to take them home with you). With an old tree look for surface roots, some can be a long way out from the tree.

Overhanging branches can also be an issue. A digger can deal with them, but not neatly, A tractor has no defence other than to just drive through. Apart from changing your route, the neatest way is to hand cut them previously, and then you need to get permission. A tractor is quite tall, you can easily not notice the branches problem. Near buildings watch out for electric cables taking aerial routes to buildings.

Gateways

These are always difficult to assess. They often look worse than they are, because they tend to muddy up and farmers often dump rocks in them to stabilise the ground, so the rocks you see may be the only ones there are, rather than indicating a huge depth of rubble. A common approach is to see what happens and be ready to sort things when they happen. You could do a dummy run, using the plough without duct. Some gateways are obviously worth avoiding, some you obviously need a stretch of digger work.

Animals

Often duct coils get left in fields for days or weeks. Sheep do not damage it, but occasionally they can get it caught in their feet and somehow it travels to the other side of the field. We have had cows chewing loose ends of duct once or twice. We have also had duct left out across the ground for a week or two (never deliberately planned, but sometimes it happens) and that does not appear to get damage from sheep, cows, horses, whatever.

Occasionally core fibre has been left overnight on a drum or in a fleet, this is a bit more valuable to take any risks with. We got the farmer to move his animals out of the field for us once, and borrowed a roll of sheep wire another time to ring fence a drum. We also had the opposite happen when Tony Swidenbank left his ploughing machine here, a farmer insisted we fence the machine off from his sheep because of the ‘sharp edges’.

Sheep are not a major hazard to duct, but they often get inquisitive when something new arrives in their field. You mainly take your chance and deal with it when it happens. (separate, inspect duct, inspect sheep, increase guard)

If you are leaving a spare couple of metres or so at the end of a field say, it is better to leave a loose end rather than tape up a circle - so that sheep don't get hooked
However cows do like to nibble loose ends. What you can do is leave a short end tucked under a rock, so you can still see it, but stock can't get to it easily.
When you are laying out duct in a field, sheep will often charge over and sniff the duct, they do not actually nibble it (this is Swaledales, there may be a breed that does......keep it out of their way......)
And it looks like the duct was just about to be rolled out, otherwise it would have been taped.

Apart from the duct, think about the animal

Improvised Fence

Animals are naturally inquisitive. At certain times of the year all the sheep come over immediately but soon lose interest and don't bother you again. Cows come over, but when they lose interest they can just mill around where you are and be a slightly dangerous nuisance.

If you give a farmer some warning you are coming, he will often move his stock to a different field for you.

Rodents - there are a few tales

"Talking to a friend, he has some overhead fibre in the USA which keeps being chewed by squirrels."

"We had rats in Dalston. Got into a broken duct and stripped all the cladding off the cable for bedding . . Breaking several fibres in the process. . ."

"We have rats, squirrels and mice. they don't seem to use duct for bedding or food, they just use it to gnaw their incisors down. the trick is not to have any duct where they can sit. they only seem to do it in areas that are comfy. Fasten it under something and they ignore it."

"Rats are a common issue. . They seem to like loose tube better than tight buffered. Also 12f is more tasty than 8f."

"16mm duct in a subduct that wasn't sealed. This is what the mice did. Along 100 metres of it, duct and fibre ruined."

Weather

In general, the drier the better for everything. If you have flexibility with the people doing the work, then it is worth postponing jobs for better weather. Most of our diggers were local people with other jobs to get on with, so it was usually possible to wait for better spells of weather. It all makes more of a mess when its wet, and you must consider the landowner. (To be honest moleploughing actually goes a bit better if the ground is damp because the ground moves around the plough a bit easier)

In the dry summer of 2018 moleploughing helped the ground crack open and the slot made by the plough didn't heal up so well, in some sections the crack had got wider after a few days.

Grass

The only crop grown in the whole of Dentdale is grass. This means certain fields can’t be trampled on for about a month or so before they are cut for silage or hay. When the field is cropped depends on the weather, a farmer may be expecting to cut his field in July but not be able to until September, and you will not be able to access his land until then. Some fields yield more than one crop in a year, but you can nip in just after a cropping, or wait until September. You have to work with whatever the farmer agrees to, even in cases where he is not the landowner, he is very much in charge.

The grass in winter can be very short and the ground usually wetter, this means things will easily turn to mud, you can simply tear the grass layer away, so fields can be out of bounds. Fields have different characteristics, some dry out very much faster than others, even ones that look identical. May, September and October would be your best months to do work.

Our moorland section had to done at exactly the right time. Some peaty sections easily turn impassably muddy with any rain and some of the heavy matted vegetation turned into a tough knit if was at all dry.

Diggers

Even before everything is up and running one of your main enemies will be a farmer with a digger. Whatever mapping system you have, whatever local knowledge you have....

Farmer knew it was there, but was looking for a drain. The fibre was somehow undamaged and a repair was made by pulling the fibre back to the nearest chamber.

Farmer knew it was there, in fact he told us to take that route to be out of harms way. Sometime later he was moving a large boulder 'out of harms way' and went through the duct. Fibre hadn't been blown at that stage.

Generally

There can be all sorts of obstacles. The first trick is to spot the problem. Your next move should be to see if it can simply be avoided. Or just have fun solving it.

A washing line. A car parked over your chamber. A farmer saying you can’t work on a Sunday. A gate being padlocked. Cows panicking and jumping over a fence. A goat running off with a coil of duct stuck round its horns. A chicken attacking you. A dog running off with your glove. (and plenty of others too numerous to mention)

Fairly minor compared to a van towing a trailer and digger slowing jack-knifing and sliding down the hill towards you, but that’s another story. (Which involves me having to sit on the steep hill in the van which was at a 30-degree angle sideways, with my foot solid on the brakes while someone straightened out the trailer with the digger) (Even stranger that I had nearly forgotten that one)

And to end on a lighter note-

A sheep you had to keep untangling from a bouncy castle. (I claim that one as unique, but let me know if it happens to you)

Any animal can decide to do anything. But you can't always avoid them and they usually do nothing. So you take your chance, inspect your stuff, deal with any problem that occurs.

This is the mini-plough working across a lawn. It needed a lot of tidying up afterwards, but was a lot quicker than any other method. Gardens have lots of roots.

There is a heavy fibre matting they put under driveways to stop weeds. Using a digger on this will just wrench big sections up and ruin the track

A smooth trench of pure clay - which makes clearing out your digger bucket tricky after every scoop

We had to leave this trench open for a couple of days across a busy footpath, so we put a bridge and tape up. If you have a group of volunteers, some guy will insist on this, let him do it.

A high wall embankment next to a stream. The houses are up there. We copied the other utilities and put a scaffold pole at an angle up through the wall.

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