Ice doesn’t sort rocks, but water from melting glaciers does, laying down gravels in neat, flat layers, often on the banks of subsequently formed rivers. Jonathan Mosse reports..
IN many cases, rural roads provide an excellent means of moving these aggregates, once extracted, to the point of use, such as on construction sites and to ready-mix concrete plants. Except, of course, where ‘rural’ suddenly becomes ‘urban’ due to the development of large swathes of new housing!
Classic cases of this phenomenon could, until recently, be found up and down the River Trent from its confluence with the Ouse, right up past the point where it becomes unnavigable above Shardlow. A much more recently exploited example is on the River Calder, east of Wakefield, specifically at Stanley Ferry, home of the classic aqueduct with its delightful colonnades, fluted Doric columns, bow-string trusses and suspended cast-iron trough.
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However, add the river into the extraction and transport mix and suddenly, problem solved: residents and planners happy, and large volumes of sand and gravel can now cheerfully find their way out for the life of the pit which, in the case of the new Stanley Ferry quarry, is expected to be in the region of 10 years.
To confirm that all was as it should be, I spent a fascinating day with the crew of the barge George Dyson fetching a load of 260 tonnes of sand from Stanley Ferry to an unloading point at the old Fleet oil terminal – now completely cleared of its fuel tanks – above Lemonroyd Locks on the Aire & Calder Navigation mainline towards Leeds.
With skipper Josh and deck hand Mike, we left Fleet empty at about 8am, riding high in the water on a sunny morning. The run was without incident, although turning a 130ft boat at a point just before the aqueducts was challenging. This is what limits the size of the craft that can be put on this flow, although beam ultimately kicks in with the width through the Calder locks being a maximum of 17ft 9in.
Loading at the pit is by the typical combination of four-wheeled bucket shovel in conjunction with a conveyor reaching out to the boat’s hold. In this instance, a pan (visible in the picture) keeps the vessel in deep water, away from the shallow, shelving bank.
Travelling the 10 miles back to Fleet we again met Cawood, the second vessel currently on this flow. This time, it was empty as it had tipped its 160 tonnes and was returning for its next day’s load. In any given day, it leaves Stanley Ferry in the morning loaded, while George Dyson departs from Fleet empty to load at about midday. As a barging operation, this is considered very civilised as, with no tides to take account of, it’s as close to a nine-to-five job as you’re ever likely to come by!
In total, then, that’s currently a little under 500 tonnes being moved in a day on average, with a target of 1000 tonnes projected. In last month’s piece I featured Heather Rose undergoing a ‘cut and shut’ in John Dean’s dry dock to enable her to make the turn at Stanley Ferry. Once she starts, three-quarters of the projected total should be accommodated, leaving just a fourth and final vessel to be identified.
As George Dyson’s regular crew, Josh and Mike are a well-matched team, young and enthusiastic. From very different backgrounds, they nevertheless clearly enjoy the job and are unphased by the many different challenges that operating a craft, no longer in its first flush of youth, throws up on a day-to-day basis!
One of the most interesting statistics that my questioning about the job in general threw up was the fuel consumption of the barge, reckoned at a steady 80 litres of diesel per 20-mile round trip… or just four litres a mile. An HGV doing the same return journey and carrying the maximum 26 tonnes permitted would consume in the region of three litres of fuel, or 300 litres to shift the same load as George Dyson, which is only using about 25% of that total.
Add in road wear and tear, the high costs around HGV operation, together with pollution from everything from the fuel burnt through to harmful brake and clutch dusts, and it’s not exactly difficult to make a case for moving bulk goods by barge… and that’s before local housing development becomes the principal driver!
