Many thanks to the volunteers who gave up their day, team working at its best seeing the circular pathway begin to take shape.  A fantastic effort by everyone and everyone played an important part doing their bit ensuring the day went to plan and ran smoothly.

Supported through the Environment Agency and Tameside Council, the hard work started today, the plant machinery was delivered to us through Travis Perkins for an agreed 08:30 start time so we could begin excavating the pathway, unfortunately they delivered the wrong size dumper but a few telephone calls later we were promised the correct delivery for tomorrow morning. 

We started excavating on the west bank at peg one working our way around the main lake to peg eleven then around the overflow to the east bank, continuing to peg twelve and working up to peg fourteen to end the day, the digger driver following the marked pathway at a depth of 15cm slowly forming the foundation trench. 

The side wall boarding team followed the digger at a safe distance, installing  the treated timber sidewalls for the bulk material infill of road planings later in the week.  A tricky beginning on a difficult corner but they made a fantastic start to the work, taking their time to ensure correct installation of the side walling all the way up to peg five.  Its probably the most time consuming part of the task and involves manually fitting and securing the side boards, measuring and ensuring levels are maintained.  The weed control membrane will go down once we are ready to infill with the planings on top

Huge thanks again to all the volunteers, a brilliant start made getting much further forward than we planned for today.  The brief rain shower gave us the opportunity for a brew, lunch and the usual team banter.  We are hoping for similar progress on Wednesday and Thursday (weather permitting) completing the foundation trenching and sidewall boarding, also installing four lengths of land drain at relevant points of the lake. 

We have planned for the final stages of the project, the laying of bulk planings, to be started on Friday, completed and rolled Saturday through to  Monday.