Rebuilding 150 Year Old Walls
Volunteer’s Skills In Action supported by Co-op Community Fund and Wade’s Charity.
We often refer to the Rehoboth as being “Behind the Secret Walls”. Stone walls encompass three and a half sides of its perimeter area with the boundary with the ”Nursery Road” and what was the original chapel without a wall. The walls are Victorian built cemented with mortar and range up to seven feet tall. Over the decades there has been severe damage to sections of the walls, especially the top perimeter wall.
A major long term project with financial support from Wade’s Charity and the Co-op Community Fund. The work commenced in late 2020, led by two experienced volunteer landscapers, supported by volunteer builders who commenced rebuilding the walls.
This project enabled the “professionals” to share their skills and develop the skills of other volunteers.
By December 2021 the wall building team were working their way down the final stretch towards the Nursery Road.
Throughout the winter of 2022 rebuilding the final stretch continued, including sourcing and fitting 100 feet of coping stones to replace ones that had gone “missing” over the years.
In the last weeks of March 2022, this 18 month project was completed with the Burial Ground now completely secure.
We now moved to completing repointing the last 50 metres of our perimeter wall on Coal Hill Lane. To ensure safety for our volunteers we commissioned a partial road closure with 3 way traffic lights on 14th and 15th June 2022.
In order to ensure we completed this work within the two days, volunteers were in action from 7.00 am onwards, completing at 4.00 pm on the second day.
We were again indebted to Rodley Scaffolding who donated the movable platforms for our pointers. Thank you.
Finally on 4th October 2022 we completed the pointing of the inside of the walls.
