Why I am not a road mender

Last week, back at the Countryside Service, I did the hardest physical day’s work that I can remember. Suffice it to say, I could barely walk home at the end of it. I now understand why road menders spend so much time standing about. Firstly, in some tasks because of physical space constraints, only one person can be working. Secondly because it is such hard work you need frequent rests.

Our base is situated in a car park. Along one side of the car park is a fenced off path, which strictly speaking is a stretch of the Pennine Bridleway. Some of this fencing was in need of repair, a repair which involved the replacement of four fence posts and some of the horizontal rails between them.  The reason it was such hard graft was that holes for the new posts had to be dug through tarmac and concrete to a depth of 68cm. The tools we had at our disposal were: A wacker (a small pneumatic drill); a shove-hole (a large, heavy tool that looks like an apple corer when it is closed, but works like tongs with shovels on the end, which scoop up the earth); a crowbar; spades; a tin cup (for getting the earth out of the hole when it becomes too deep for the shove-hole); a tape measure; a spirit-level for posts; materials for making concrete; a wheelbarrow.  I took my turn with each of these tools, including the pneumatic drill. This was much easier to work with than I had envisaged, but I can understand why operators who use these things all the time end up with “vibration white finger”.

The work was slow. It took us all day to dig the four holes, but of course quite quick to cement in the posts. I enjoyed making the concrete in the wheelbarrow. This was something my father showed me how to do many moons ago, so I know the recipe (roughly) in terms of proportion of grit to sand to cement and water.  I’m glad that we don’t do this sort of thing every week, as I think my enthusiasm for volunteering might dissipate quite quickly.

By way of light relief, the next day I went out to do another bird survey. This was much the same as the last, but because we were early, there seemed to be more activity.  The highlight though, that made it all worthwhile, was that the warden could hear some juvenile long-tailed tits. The chirping was coming from a nearby tree which he searched with his binoculars. Eventually he spotted nine baby long-tailed tits huddled together on a branch, high up. I looked at them through the binoculars and was delighted to see them. They were so cute! We stood for several minutes watching the mother bird flying in and feeding them.  We both cursed the fact that neither of us had a camera – it would have made the wildlife picture of the year.