Hartsop bridge repair

Bridge repairs at Hartsop.

One of our roles as Rangers, is to work alongside tenant farmers in helping to maintain, boundary walls, gates and fences on their farm land and in this case a bridge.

As you can see from this picture the bridge had become very worn, with numerous holes starting to appear.

The plan was to re-use the steel girders that the rotten beams where sat on. New timbers had been ordered from our in house saw mill based at Boon Crag near Coniston.

They were very heavy

The old beams where cut out and the new ones placed onto the steel girder

They were then bolted into place.

It was a very fiddly job to get the nut screwed onto the bottom of the bolt!

Some of the new beams didn’t match up to the previous holes that had been drilled into the girder, this meant new ones had to be drilled.

Although the girder was well over 10 years old and looked like it had seen better days. It was still extremely strong.

A few alterations had to be made to the final beams, so that they fitted around the old fence posts.

A chainsaw was slightly quicker than using a hand saw!

Once the final beams had been slotted into place, it was clear to see the huge improvement we had made.

The farmers cattle were now safe to cross the bridge once more.