There’s been a lot going on down at The Somersetshire Coal Canal recently, we hosted a one-off Big Work Party on 13th April, we had the official handover of the Metal Miner statue from the Somerset Miners Trust and we’ve also been lucky enough to have a new bench donated by a local resident after ours was vandalised last year.
BIG WORK PARTY – 13th April 2025
Earlier in the year we decided to organise a one-off work party with the aim of making some significant progress on the restoration of the abutment walls of Terminus Bridge at Paulton end of the canal. We have been trying to restore the walls for a couple of years now, but we needed more people to push it along a bit. We put a call out on social media for help and asked all the people we knew if they could come along! We also asked local businesses if they could help. We carry out work parties every Sunday at Paulton, but the idea of a one-off work party was much more popular. As with any event, we had a lot of people pull out due to illness etc, and we also had a lot of people saying they may be able to come, so we weren’t sure what would happen on the day! As it turned out, we had 23 volunteers turn up, all of which were very enthusiastic and raring to go!
Local businesses did not disappoint either. Robbie Allen Fireplaces was the only professional stonemason we had volunteer, and he not only offered his time, but we learnt a lot from him too. Jewson Radstock loaned us a petrol stone cutter free of charge, we had cakes supplied by The Fairy Cake House, Court Above The Cut came along and filmed the event using their camera equipment and drone and The Red Lion Paulton cooked all our food for us afterwards. Paul Gilbert Carpentry and General Building and Dave Wordley Building & Maintenance both offered their skills for the day and Studio four point ten also came along and helped with the labouring. All of this was free of charge.
We had several new volunteers turn up, some of our regular volunteers and some from the Combe Hay Work Party came over to join us too. We cannot thank everyone enough; they all willingly gave up their time to help us. We were absolutely blown away with the turnout. We had so many volunteers that we managed to split off into different groups and did some tidying up work around the dry dock area as well as the work on Terminus Bridge walls. Due to the remote location of the canal, we had some challenges around parking. Two local residents kindly offered their driveways, so we had volunteers manning the parking areas with painted signs directing people to their parking. Even making the tea and coffee for breaktime was a challenge for 23 people!
We made such fantastic progress on the walls that we are now considering another one-off session to get it over the finish line! Thank you to everyone that attended.