Finishing the footpath at Stone Arthur

Since our last post, we've finished our upland path repair work for the season; culminating in the completion of the footpath up Stone Arthur. You can see how the path looked prior to us commencing work in a previous blog post here... link

Lower Section (completed and landscaped)

There's still a lot of bare soil visible, as many of the photos were taken just before, or just after, putting the grass seed down. Although it was late in the year, hopefully the grass will start to germinate next spring. We'll have a look at it next year and put extra seed down if required.

The following two photographs show work on the tricky bedrock section. The surrounding area has since been landscaped by moving large quantities of soil on to the lower side of the path below the drain and then edging with turf (you can just see a pile of turf that was kept to one side on the left hand side of the second photo).

Building the drain on the bedrock section

Bedrock section after joining up to the middle section

The next series of photographs show the completion of the middle and top sections. The middle section turned out to be particularly wet due to water flowing just under the surface, out the bank and on to the path. To remedy this we dug out a long side trench (not pictured) on the bank above the path that fed into a stone drain.

Working on the middle section

Middle section joined to top section

Completed top section

Further up the path we worked on another section that had started to deteriorate due to people taking different lines while descending a section of bedrock. The damage was exacerbated by the volume of water that flowed down the path during wet weather.

Before starting work on the bottom section

Bottom section (completed and landscaped)

You can see how we've removed three separate paths and created one sustainable line. We've also incorporated three stone drains into the section of path to remove as much rainwater as possible.

Bedrock part of top section

This section of bedrock at the top was the root cause of much of the damage so the path was continued around it up to a point where the path started to flatten off.

Finished section before landscaping

Landscaped top section

With our Fix the Fells work completed for the year we'll now be working lower down in the valleys, on National Trust land, until next spring.