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Deciding where the best places are for road crossings is an early priority, and then to get them done, because the road crossing may not be successful, or may have to move a bit from where it was planned. Steve Foster has just managed to cross here It’s not often he switches to alkathene, he did, just to get to the gate.
We knew the field was going to get pretty bad down towards the road, but we set Tony Middleton off moleploughing in that direction, to see how far he would get. The top half was good, but then there was a dubious slope and that flat section down by the road that had a fair bit of bedrock. Top section was perfect ploughing as we thought, but the slope was made of boulder stuff. You can often just sort out a short section by hand and continue, but there comes a point…..
A good view of Tony’s machine here. It has hooked under a big boulder and pulled it up. Previous bits weren’t too good, so we rip the 16 back to the point where it’s acceptably laid. This particular boulder will get moved to the side of the field, maybe by hand, probably by digger.
Here people are still seeing if they can sort the hill out by hand. Tony is now going back up (note the angle he is climbing at) to drive back over the upper section to pat down the good section of ploughing. When he gave up on the hill, he continued without duct, to plough along our ‘best looking route’ to Steve’s gate, to see whether the going got any better lower down. It didn’t, but it still looked like a possible route with a digger.
A few days later. We’ve called in the digger, started at the slope and laid the 16mm inside some 25mm outer duct from that point. The big boulder is still there at the side, but out of the trench now. The digger works its way down the hill, following the scratch mark the plough made.
The scratch line route turns into shallow bedrock eventually and we have to give up with that and fill the trench back in (front middle of the picture).
We try a second, longer route. This goes better, with just a few high spots of rock. We use an angle grinder to cut down through these and also use outer protection again. This gets us to the road at our crossing point.
You can now claim for 80m of duct laid.
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