Emergancy Call the Fire Brigade

If you need an emergency job doing just call our two Rangers Jack and Andy. Over the summer we have had jobs coming in left right and centre. Here's a wee taster! First job was to pull a dead sheep out of Derwent water that started to smell not at all like the new fragrance by Lacoste.  The second job was to unblock one of our donation cairn's. So we set off down to Friar's Crag with Anthony one of our foresters. Using the foresters tractor to lift the cairn on to the trailer we took it to the bank,also known as Bowe Barn! Once it was back at Bowe Barn, Andy and John started to dismantle the bottom part of the cairn. Once they had removed a few stones they were able to get access to the box, which then allowed them to prise the box open at which point they thought it was job done. How wrong were they, they then found out that it was blocked at the top. So we tried all sorts, threading wire down, rocking it side to side. Nothing worked, so I came up with the idea to get the pressure washer that we use to clean our vehicles to blast the money out. The picture above shows the process of using the pressure washer. After a couple of blasts we did manage to unblock it, with a few notes getting wet in the process, and the workshop slowly turning into a lake. We did find the reason why it was blocked up. Somebody thought it was too easy to put an old boat time table into a  bin so he thought he would put it in our cairn instead!

The next job was to go and repair a gate and rails that had been partially demolished by some seriously poor driving on the Catbells road. Perhaps they had been distracted by the view! So we set off with some new rails, posts and straining post. The first job was to get the old straining post out for which we had help from Peter Edmundson, our local tenant whose gate we were repairing. Next we put  the straining post into the hole that the old post came out of, phew no digging. This was then followed by retensioning the wire to the new straining post. Lastly we nailed  new rails on, taking time to line them up properly to make the field stoke proof. The two pictures below show a before and after.