Reunion 1999:
Over on the Hereford & Gloucester Canal
"Pant's off - it's all Over"
Photos and text by Martin Ludgate.

For this year's WRG Reunion Working Party on 6-7 November, well over 100 volunteers descended upon Over, near Gloucester on the Hereford & Gloucester Canal, where a derelict hospital site is being transformed back into a canal basin with a posh new waterside housing development being built alongside. And the job needs to be finished soon, as the first houses will be going up in the Spring and - for some inexplicable reason - it is thought that the people moving into them will want a view of a restored canal, rather than the muddy hole in the ground that it looks like now....


Some of the people at Over, with a white minibus that AVH Truck Rental had kindly lent us free of charge for the weekend. It wasn't quite so white by the time they got it back!


Most of the construction work done over the weekend was bricklaying - on the longer and shorter limbs of the 85-metre long wharf wall that runs along two sides of the canal basin....
We received 100 new hard hats - and assembled them.

Guy Fawkes night was celebrated in the traditional way on the Saturday night. Adopting the slogan 'Penny for the Guy', an effigy of David Penny of the Hereford & Gloucester Canal Trust duly met a fiery end. (The real David Penny narrowly escaped a similar fate!)

...and on the other side-wall of the new slipway...
...and on the side-wall of the new slipway being installed for launching boats...

...and on the curved wall that joins the two limbs of the wharf wall together.
A spot of traditional scrub bashing & bonfire!

Despite the problems of waterlogged ground due to the bad weather beforehand, preventing some of the planned jobs (such as installing gabion bank-protection and constructing the slipway base) from being tackled, and hampering others, it was a highly successful weekend. We achieved a great deal of useful work on the canal, and we got a chance to meet up with all our WRGie friends.
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