Walking on water

It seems a long time since the good weather of spring and summer now that the rainy season is really upon us.
In spring I spent a fair amount of time helping to build a new boardwalk along the shore of Windermere to link the Trusts campsite at Low Wray with Wray Castle and the newly upgraded Windermere lakeshore bridleway.

After so much recent rain it seemed like a good time to look back on the project.

  Finished boardwalk keeping everyone's feet dry.

Boardwalk stats;

• Its over 35m long and 1.8m wide
• There are more than 300 bolts and 3500 screws holding it all together
• We used 3.5 tons of recycled plastic to make the boardwalk.  We used plastic because it won't rot or get too slippery.
• There are more than 140 posts, some 3m long hammered (by hand) into the ground to build the deck on.  If you added all the posts together that's more than 250m of post hammered in!
• It took about 30 days to build with volunteers and interns helping us rangers.

We met several problems and learned a lot of lessons during the project, firstly don't make your boardwalk curved unless you have too - its very awkward.  Second have some tall people to hammer the long posts in....

  Short ranger and long post ... 

The answer

Stand on a milk crate!

Looking back all I can remember is days of hammering (or someone else hammering)

Craig hammering with John holding the post square.

We used a lot of posts in the ground partly to stop the boardwalk sinking in and partly to stop it floating off when the lake water rises in the winter.

A shiny new (at the time) intern fixing the deck down.

One disadvantage of using the plastic meant that whenever we cut pieces or drilled them we had to collect all the swarf to stop it falling into the lake.  

Trimming the planks to length and catching the waste in a bag.

Richard Tanner

Woodland Ranger