Daisy Bank Clough: 'stepopolis' continued!
Yet another sunny day in this sheltered spot for Ian V and Frank H to complete steps that will make the ascent up the side of the clough less hazardous.
As a reminder, this is what we started with:
The route up to the stile is steep, wet and made unstable by the rotted debris of historic attempts at building steps.
The plan was to construct steps that went straight on from the end of the footbridge, then traversed left before rising up to the stile.
Last week saw us part way through this process.
At the end of today, this was the result:
The job was not without technical difficulties. Saturation by recent heavy rain revealed the 'weakness' of the ground and how easily step treads could puddle.
These problems were overcome by using very long stobs, making the revetments as interlocking as possible and layering the step tread area with textile, coarse stone then finer stone.
This involved a lot of barrowing but fortunately two members of the Todmorden mafia (aka CROWS Mick C and RJ) appeared to shovel and haul. Thanks, guys - lots of hard work without any of the glory (apart from this 'mention in dispatches').
There is just a small amount of landscaping to do, and three other steps to build so access to the footbridge is possible from a path that comes in from the right (see top picture) - a straightforward task easily done by a couple of volunteers in half a day . . . Mmm! we've said that before . . . !
