13/6/17

Estelle Sandford, James Begley, Mike Moxon, Duncan Simey, Miri Simey, Jonathan Riley, Stu Lindsay

2.5hrs

Duncan, Miri and Mike rotated through digging all evening while Stu was fettling the aerial runway and James, Estelle and Jon were hauling and emptying buckets and Jon filled bags to go around the base of the ladder to protect it from getting buried! The aerial runway takes the need for 2 extra people out, so means we can get away with 5 now. 3 below and 2 surface hauling and emptying. The base of the wall is in place, so getting some filled bags in place as a path was the next mission as the mud is still very sticky. Repaired buckets with string for handles don’t work on the runway so we need to get some more as down to 4 useable ones. Hopefully back to more regular digging again now the engineering works have been done and we’ve set up for better spoil dumping – hopefully we might find cave with space to dump stuff before we run out of space…!

6/6/17

blog post written by Mike Moxon

Duncan & I arrived before Stu & Jon, so Duncan went to look for survey points in the top passage, whilst I went to check out the main dig - turned out some of the mud had collapsed at the end of the passage, so I levered out some more & found another small aven. Once Stu & Jon had arrived they started fixing the cable & I filled the buckets from the collapse before hand over handing them back to the spoil heap. Cable fixed at both ends & first bucket run back along it, but needs more work in removing rock that gets in the way (mainly on floor). Some more of the collapse still to remove as well.

30/5/17

Blog written by Duncan Simey

Relaxed evening at Cutlers Green.
Stuart fettled the ladder to make it easier to step on and off.
Jon and Mike built the wall
Miri and I improved the rock to clay ratio in the foundations at the right hand end of the wall.
Wall building finished with a team effort getting large boulders into the foundations at the right hand end of the wall.
Last job of the day was for Stuart to measure and plan for installing the Ariel Ropeway.