Rain and more rain

Monday morning at work and we’d had an awful lot of rain during the weekend.  The lake level was right up.  We have a very popular footpath near Keswick that floods on a regular basis and stops people being able to walk through the woodland.  It also causes a lot of damage to the footpath and every year large sections have to be repaired.  So, we are looking at alternatives rather than just repeating the same-old-same-old. 

One of the things we are looking at is the potential for putting a recycled-plastic board-walk through the wood to raise the path above the water level.  This would mean it would be accessible for most or all of the year and would need little maintenance.  We’ve already put a similar board-walk at the southern end of Derwentwater and that has been an extremely successful project.  Although it is early days, we have a lot of planning consents to get prior to work starting so it was an opportune time to go through the area and check the flood water levels.  I put a lot of posts in a canoe, donned a dry suit and, using the canoe as my floating wheelbarrow, went through the wood.  Every 20 metres on the line for the path, I hammered in a post so that the top of the post was 10 cm above the lake level to give me a uniform level through the woodland.  I’d surveyed the previous posts with a ‘stumpy’ level and found they were uniformly 10 cm below the lake level so it was very useful to go through when it was flooded!

Later that day, as I drove between two sites in Borrowdale, I saw two different pairs of roe deer.  In the middle of the day, in the middle of the fields, they were just grazing happily. 

Spot the deer!