The work begins...

Broken Brae Fishing Lakes had been created out of a gravel quarry and whilst the site had great potential it was obvious that it would take a lot of work to transform what was a rather overgrown and neglected site into somewhere people might want to stay for their holidays.
There were three major problems to overcome, firstly the site was overgrown with vegetation, secondly there were mounds of earth which was basically spoil from the gravel quarrying operation in places where it shouldn’t have been and thirdly we needed to build up the flood defences to protect the site from the potential risk from the river.
The vegetation issue was the first issue to solve, with the help of some experts in the form of Sean Perkiss and Dave Pickford. The task of clearing out 20 years of random growth began, we had literally hundreds of trees and masses of assorted vegetation to clear, this eventually took three months of hard work.


Les Helme, a local groundwork’s contractor, was given the job of main contractor on the site. He initially came in with a couple of 360 diggers and a fleet of tractors and trailers to literally move mountains. We needed somewhere to put something like 22000 cubic meters of earth, not an insubstantial amount! Les calmly suggested we part the topsoil on the 9 acre field we had conveniently acquired with the site, spread the spoil and then repatriate the topsoil, this would raise the height of the field by 500mm. No problems then!

The issue of the flood defences was a major headache. Whilst we understood what needed doing to protect the site against the 100 year flood level, plus global warming it was no small task. There was a bund running along the river bank for 2/3 of a mile which had been put in as local protection, however the extensive survey we had done suggested the height need to be raised in some areas and repairs needed to done where the river had eroded it over the years.
The Environment Agency were adopting a belt and braces approach to the repairs, which if you see the River Swale in flood is understandable. The Swale is the fastest flowing river in England and rises and falls very quickly. We had to clear most of the vegetation from the river banks leaving just the mature trees in place. Hundreds of tons of hardcore was placed along the top and river side of the bank to build it up where necessary, then geotech matting was sandwiched between layers of topsoil, and the whole lot seeded with grass which would root into the matting to offer protection from water erosion. The floods in August 2008, one of the highest levels on record, proved the integrity of the defences, thank goodness.


We started this work in March 2008 and by the end of May we were ready to start building lodges.