I figured one time that there are some fifteen miles (yes miles, I never took to the metric system, nor has anyone else here) of trails and walking paths that need continuous work. Some are essentially raised pathways, like the wooden ones that cross sensitive biomes like the marsh area that lies between the Estate Building and the yurts beyond that marsh area for our seasonal staff.
Any path that get high traffic like those from the guest yurts to the centre of the Estate receive slate or brick, allowing mosses to grow between them and precipitation to flow into the soil. The slate has been imported for over a century from Wales, the bricks for the last fifty years or so come from building demos in Edinburgh as they’ve a hard finish that holds up well under the most adverse of conditions.
You’d think that such paths would hold up well for a long time but you’d be wrong. The main problem is since we didn’t ground cloth under the them as that killed the soil under them, they sink rather quickly into the soil, in less than a decade, usually. So we remove them from pathway, replace any damaged bricks, add more river stones beneath, and carefully space them out.
Now I admit that neither path surface is ideal in wet weather; both can be very slippery under wet conditions but they still beat either conifer chips or granite dust since both have a very short lifespan and also behave poorly also in wet weather. The latter are better once the ground freezes solid.
Our bridges here are designed to last a long time, built of stone, timber and iron. We don’t quarry stone here but import it again from a quarry we’ve used for well over a century. The bridges would last longer if we used preservatives such as creosote on them but the bloody stuff is a potent toxin, so that’s not going to happen. The most important part of any bridge are the planks beneath the feet, so vehicles can use it, so we check those carefully every spring.
Most bridges are small structures’ needing light maintenance; other ones such as the Troll Bridge which has a fifty foot span over the the river that runs through the estate receives a full and detailed examination, everything from the footings to every fastening in it. And yes, there is a troll under it made of stone who’s at least a century and a half old according to the records and no one knows where it came from.
We even check the Troll which lives under that bridge to make sure that he’s not sinking too fast into the soft river mud. Yes he will settle in but we don’t want that to happen too quickly so he’s actually on a granite platform.
The best part of this work is that it’s allowed us to increase the number of full-time staffers resident on the estate as the added work was enough to warrant it. And that is a good thing indeed.u
