Restoration - Week 33

Like something from an enchanted forest, parts of the old ground are coming back to what they once were and emerging from a blanket of moss and weed. With the wet weather I have been able to dig deep and get entrenched large roots cut out and removed from this East section of the terracing.

The moss particularly has been thickest here and on these riser steps and again most of the concrete has long gone, so we are bucketing out the ash infill and scrubbing what stone remains. As you can see from these close-ups, the moss is like a green sticky wool and a bugger to remove properly.

But another ten hours graft this week made another wee dent in this section and every little bit done greatly improves the look of the terracing. Working with wire brushes as it is the only way to remove the moss almost strand by strand, but it is a laborious process.

However the stonework underneath is in great condition and scrubs up really well. Been sifting all of the spoil from here as well but still not unearthed anything of historical interest! Then we remove all of the ash, stone and mud from each terrace step before repacking the earth underneath and then

covering with buckets of red blaes from the track. This is, I hasten to add only a temporary solution and this will need to be back-filled with concrete in the next 12 months before we can truly sign off the work here. But it looks 100% better than it did in January when we began the restoration!!

We aim to have this section completed by the end of 2018, which would be 1/3 of this terrace restored and both riser stairwells. The side sections will be cleared and fixed up once the trees have shed their leaves and we can see the terracing a bit more clearly.

Then the plan is to move on to the last remaining untouched section still extant, on the SE corner, which has all but disappeared under the trees and waist-high weeds. And again due to the soft earth due to the heavy rain we managed to get working again on the running track this week, clearing another 12 x ? ft section. This was then packed hard and levelled out and is an improvement on the bumpy, unsafe surface it has been for as long as I have been involved here. It's another BIG job and will take at least a year to put right. But already I can envisage the thundering footsteps of players

racing around the running track again....or perhaps that is just the ghosts of all of those footballers who trained and played here over the last 134 years?