Streams

They range from a soggy gully to a full-blown river. Some are capable of drying up entirely in summer or becoming very fierce after a couple of days of rain.

The typical stream in Dentdale is a gully a metre or two wide and up to a metre deep. This will just be a damp ditch in dry spells but react quickly to rain. It will be at a steepish angle, so the water can be forceful.

1 There is a tiny version of this stream which can be moleploughed straight through. (Inspect afterwards, you may have to redo it - but if you watch carefully as it is ploughed you should be able to see if it goes deep enough)

2 The next size stream up requires a digger to dig across the gully at right angles, in order to lay some alkathene outer ducting. A metal pipe can be used as a collar to the alkathene for the central metre or so of the trench to add mass, strength and rigidity. Good backfilling is required and maybe some strategic placement of rocks by hand to avoid the risk of erosion in the next wet spell.

2a With some streams it may be possible to construct something inside the bed manually. Fault lines in bedrock may not be able to be tackled by a digger but maybe with a pick it could be possible to get a metal pole satisfactorily buried inside the stream.

These operations are best carried out when there is no water, although it should have been viewed during a wet spell to see how it reacts to rain. Maybe inspect during and after the next storm as well. A sudden deluge very soon after completion is likely to mean some remedial work.

3 With the next size up, you are into forming your own bridge (maybe alongside an existing bridge), or

4 using existing bridges

Once you are into real rivers and real roads then you are getting close to real regulations. That's probably beyond standard volunteer work, that's filed away separately under Rivers.

Backfilling up one side of the stream before tackling the bed and the other bank.

1 Moleplough through

This is not the kind of stream ploughing-through works on. You need a flatter bed, this stream will be in a small squarish channel up to a foot deep. The driver gives it his best shot by going through at an angle (that will get his plough as deep as possible as he crosses the stream). He stops to inspect (the cameraman will have told him anyway) and they have to do a bit of manual work to sort it out, there and then.

Cut duct, put 2 metres of metal collar on it and bury the pipe at right angles to the stream solidly into the banks. Join duct, start moleploughing again.

2 Digging through

Digging straight through. You might consider moleploughing through if it looked like the foreground in the picture (but we had already discovered it was very rocky).

We ambitiously tried to moleplough straight through this one. We had lowered the banks either side by digger beforehand, but it was clearly not working in the central section. So we left an extra metre of duct slack as we ploughed on and came back later to dig into the stream bed.

Duct too shallow. Sideways pressure of rocks eventually broke this.

Moleploughing straight through a small beck is quite possible, but it needs someone to watch the plough angle as it goes through. Coming through a bit shallow is not really going to work. Even if you were fairly deep, you have added a softer section across the beck which will start to erode readily. Someone really needs to inspect a couple of times, like soon after and after the next two storms.

Once you see orange, it needs to be repaired. Get it in a couple of metres of scaffold pole.

In fact the fibre nearly survived

Digging through photos (below) from Whitechapel B4RN, all of the same crossing

Views from the southside before and after

Views from the northside

Long outer duct. Deep scoop into the bed and into each bank,. Take care backfilling the banks, especially the chamber side

But maybe not like this....

The scaffold pole has been laid across the stream, just out of shot at the bottom of the second picture.

That pole appears to have been laid within a foot or two of the water level in this stream. Obviously heavy wooded, this could easily block when a few branches get swept down in the next storm. You either have to be below the stream or well above it. This stream is tiny, you could scoop through that very quickly.

2a Digging Across Manually

Wow - a perfect stream for crossing. Some wonderful fault lines from side to side.

Excavate the loose gravel between two of the slabs, put your pole in and backfill. You could even add fast setting cement.

Switch to alkathene for some neat weaving inside the riverbank wall and you are into the field and away.

3 Forming your own bridge

There will be some big streams you can dig through. It will usually be the shape of the banks that are the problem, or that the stream always has a substantial water flow.

You start to consider a bridge when you have steeper banks of say over a metre deep. The digger approach won’t really work here. The answer is the galvanised scaffold pole. They are 6m (20 ft) long and can be cut with an angle grinder (file off the sharp edges). That is plenty long enough for most of our becks, the trick is to find a good crossing point where the banks are strong and the span short. A good place is alongside an existing footbridge (ideally on the downstream side). This way the bridge protects the pole from branches and stuff that may wash down the stream. It also looks a lot better next to the bridge. A telegraph pole is another solution, but then you have the problem of attaching it to the pole in a way that will last.

Slightly higher than the banks, this needed alkathene and a bit of stonework either end

We have tucked a metal pipe between the railway sleepers that formed this bridge and filled in with cement. It was soon invisible.

Complicated by our trench flooding from the stream during the operation.

A nice construction done by the farmer himself.

Scaffold pole. Not easy to bend, but you can. This one only just stretches, it needs a bag of ready-mix concrete either end.

That's looks a long span, but it is resting on part of the bridge halfway.

Hiding our scaffold pole with a telegraph pole as it is on a busy footpath route

4 Existing bridges

may also lend themselves to other solutions for getting duct across.

We bolted a scaffold pole to the side of a farm bridge.

We have used 25 mm galvanised pipe inside this bridge, it comes in 4 metre lengths that can be screwed together.

Sections of scaffold pole buried round the edge of this bridge, with alkathene inserts at the joints.

We used part of the handrail of a road bridge for a spur to a single farm.

I just hope they considered the handrail as a route. It looks perfect and a better option than tacking it along the ground

If you can get it parallel to the bridge and horizontal it looks better, but you can't always do that.

There are lots of cases where you don't get much choice where to put your pole and your main mission is to get it there somewhere. But, if you can make it parallel to the bridge and horizontal then it looks a lot better. Ideally you would like it alongside the bridge. An alternative is black alkathene which you might be able to snake round so that most of it is under the bridge.

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