M.H. We've got to pull that tree down with the rope.
J.J. But our feet will slip
M.H. Tie the rope to the car.
J.J. But the Car's wheels will slip on the snow.
A.L. I know, tie the rope to the sledge!
J.J. But we've got to push the sledge and our feet will slip on the snow?
M.H. got it! Tie the rope to the sledge and the sledge to the car!

Above - Andy gives Jem a lift by driving his dads car round the car park at great speed. There was hell to pay in the Jackson household when Jem's mum saw the state of the sledge afterwards.

Obviously at this point the leaders were doing all the work. That was a pattern that the RVU established early on in this project.

And introducing the new, barely invested Venture Scouts. Left to right, John Goodwin, Ross Denton, Dave Gardener. Here they can be seen helping by mucking around with a frozen puddle.

Between all the mucking around with ice and playing with sledges the RVU did do some work that day. But it was mainly chopping up piles of undergrowth.

And when the brave young princes had decided that they could fight no more, they rested. And the Irish they came, with their dragons of steel that eats trees and mud and drainage pipes.

The next Saturday that we were called to work at the hall, was to clear all the rotting vegetation that we had chopped previously and to assist the JCB in digging the foundations. The JCB would also be used to dig out the tree stumps that we were unable to move.

We had agreed with the District that we could dump all our rubbish in Crow camp. They were trying to fill in one of the deep ditches and were happy to get a load of mud. They weren't so happy about the vegetation. In the end we filled the blue lorry five times and sent it to Crow Camp.

Because the site had been a small but dense forest for 20 years, the top soil was of reasonably good quality. It was decided that we would keep some, bag it and sell it to raise cash. (That never happened.)

In stead we dumped it in the bushes the other side of the church car park. This was supposed to be only a temporary store but Andy J decided that if we spread several tonnes of it about and jump on it, the church will never notice that the weeds have been replaced by a shed load of manky mud.

Now as the church quite rightly prevented us from working on Sundays, all this was going on, during a Saturday morning. Our JCB loading the lorry blocked the car park for quite some time, which stressed out the people running the dance school and the craft fair in the church halls.

Whilst digging the deeper part of the foundation adjacent to the existing hall the JCB operator suddenly stops and tells us there is a pipe down there. We dug a few extra inches by hand and sure enough there is a drainage pipe from the gutters of our hall. We initially ask him to carefully dig around it but then the Jones boys decide that it's probably blocked anyway so we can scrap it and re-route it around the new hall or into the new soak away.