Another day, another mixture of weird weather - from slathering on the factor 50 to running for the waterproof in torrential rain aka thunderplumps although it didn't actually thunder. Started out by working away at the path from the site huts to the site, which last year (due to the drought) was bone dry but this year is an extensive quagmire with a range of fetching water features, so needed a load of small stones from the beach to be laid then covered with sand. Here we deployed our secret weapon - one of our two Mucktrucks, our little power barrows, which can carry 365kg of sand at once:
This is a great little piece of kit and we really appreciate the help of all of our supporters both individual donors and charitable organisations who enable us to buy equipment and to run the excavation. We're hoping that having powered barrows will both ease the workload and speed up the task of uncovering the site when the main team arrives and we start in earnest.
We still had to get the sand up from the beach though, which wasn't as much fun when the weather turned on us:
You're probably looking at that pic and thinking that there's a few funny looking piles of bright green seaweed there which look a bit odd - in fact that's grass that has been strimmed off the site by Ian and his son Chris, and that's our other job today - endlessly raking up grass and moving it off the site so it's clear for the ground penetrating radar survey along with the laser scanning. Ian & Chris have done wonders - it's horribly tussocky ground covered in thistles & nettles, plus they carried on regardless throughout the aforementioned thunderplump:
Their efficiency does rather mean that we now have our work cut out for us as we've got to rake all the rest of the grass off, but that's a job for tomorrow - hopefully the weather gods will be kind to us and we'll have a bit of dry weather, especially as Hannah has discovered that her steel-toed trainers are only waterproof if she adds a layer of plastic bags!
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