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....
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![]() 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. |