Path work

This week has been great, weather-wise, and we have taken advantage of some dry conditions to make some excellent progress with path work in a number of areas:

• Between 6th green and 7th/16th teeing areas
• Adjacent to 8th tee
• Area beside 1st tee

Firstly, and most importantly, I'd like to say a huge thank you to Dennis Roberts, PPGC member and our expert mini-digger operator. Dennis kindly worked for the golf club on Thursday and Friday of this week to help us to restore the paths. If you see Dennis at the club, be sure to buy him a beer at the bar! I'll update this post with a few before and after photos, just to serve as a record of the progress that has been made so far.

Over the next 2 weeks, we hope to continue our progress with this path. The spoil to the right of the path is a combination of rotted woodchip and soil that had contaminated the path. Dennis has graded this area and we should allow it to recover, dry out and, in time, it will revert to grass. The most important thing is that golfers now have a dry, firm path upon which to walk until we manage to cap it off with a suitable surface material. Keep your eyes on the blog for more info.

You will also see that we have made some progress (again, using Dennis' skills) at the path beside the 8th tee. The photos below show what it did look like:

As you will recall, this area was not particularly great to walk through/pull a trolley through. So we asked Dennis to grade it off and ensure that any water that came down this path would feed into a sump hole and drain away into the ditch via a drainage trench. Therefore, Dennis promptly excavated a trench for us, as demonstrated below:

What we will do is to fill the sump hole with gravel and rubble. Then we will install some drainage pipe in the trench, running as far as the ditch. Following this, we will backfill over the pipe with clean pea gravel, top off the trench with some sandy soil and then turf over the trench. We hope to get this work done over the next 2-3 weeks. Just to big Dennis up even more, here are a few photos of what the path looks like now at the 8th tee:

We are extremely pleased with 2 fantastic days of work on the paths and we are hopeful that members and visitors are reassured that the golf club has been really proactive and timely in ensuring that this work is addressed before the start of the season.