In October 2009 the Village Pond project is well under way and gaining momentum.
When Francis Harcombe said ‘Shall I bring my Tonka toy and blitz it?’ – well how could I refuse!
8am on a sunny Saturday morning in October Francis arrived with his lovely big yellow JCB to blitz Coverfield Wood. Within an hour the bracken and brambles had been removed and as our willing volunteers arrived at 10am – well things were well and truly under way and by 1pm the job was done – AMAZING!
Everyone was so excited and couldn’t believe the transformation that had been achieved in such a quick time. The momentum of this community project had begun, the Village Pond was already looking fantastic but there was still much to be done.
Time to Rock and Roll and get this village pond back to its former glory
Something that Neil had been facing was how to solve the huge challenge of the village pond’s eroding bank. This was a serious problem as a good 5 ft of the bank had been lost over the years so it had to be solved quickly.
Neil was confident that this village pond did NOT need Gabions! – there is no major water flow so that would be overkill. The idea of building a stone wall around the bank with back fill seemed a logical solution and as we live near to The Malvern Hills – well how difficult could that be?
Neil voiced his idea to various people in the village and got some interesting feedback – ‘you must be mad’ – ‘Malvern stone is like rocking horse sh**’ – ‘it costs at least £25 a ton – there is no budget!’ Undeterred Neil ploughed on with his idea.
His first port of call was to invite the Malvern Gazette (The original article) to report on the story of our village pond clear up. They were actually very keen and came along
to take picture and during the interview Neil shared his vision of re building the bank in stone. He simply asked if the paper would add a request in the article for Malvern stone donations to help the village pond project.
The day the paper went on sale Neil’s phone started ringing, and ringing! He was blown away by the amount of Malvern stone folks wanted to donate and most of them were so happy to get rid of it! As long as we could pick it up, they would donate with pleasure!
Within a week Neil had about 30 ton of stone ready for collection. He contacted Will Hall from the Worcestershire Community Pay Back Scheme and invited his team to come over and help. This was an ideal project for Wills team and they were really up for it and the next phase of the village pond transformation was under way.
Read the next instalment
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