Where Would We Be Without Our Valiant Volunteers?
Volunteers are the absolute backbone of our heritage sites, windmills, museums and nature reserves. Working as guides, in the café, behind the scenes or front of house, building, repairing or cleaning – the list goes on. Restorations are especially challenging. Historic buildings can be remarkably demanding. They charm you until you are utterly in their thrall and then like a diva become ever more spoilt and querulous, and exhausted you give way every time. I speak from some experience! One can pretend to be in charge of the situation, but knowing full well that actually the ‘building decides’.
Lincolnshire’s waterways have seen some amazing volunteering effort on the Sleaford and Louth Navigations and the Grantham Canal. Repairing and rebuilding locks, running trip boats, clearing canals of weed.
The Grantham Canal Society for example has around 900 members who do an extraordinary variety of tasks and in 2023 clocked up a mighty 18,620.5 hours of volunteer work.
Removing fallen timber, clearing the banks of self-set trees, dredging to remove the mud flushed out from field drains. Weed boats Otter and Mudlark are used for the clearing of the ever-growing weed. All this helps keep the navigation open so they can run their popular trip boat Three Shires (bookable at www.granthamcanal.org ).
The construction team have done some amazing and complicated work on restoring locks, they’re currently on lock 13. Behind the scenes there are feasibility studies, surveys and strategies to be put together for the proposed re-connection of the canal to the River Trent.
Not forgetting the vital cake bakers, because every event requires cake of course!
RSPB and Lincolnshire Wildlife Trust also have loyal bands of volunteers. RSPB Frampton Marsh has over a 100 volunteers and as on the Grantham Canal there are tasks to suit everyone’s talents and abilities.
