Monday 14 September 2020

Bucket on a Roundabout

The authorities have been installing new cycle lanes down the road in Yate. As part of the work a major roundabout was fiddled with and a new thing - I'm not sure what to call it - was created.


An installation, an artwork, a memorial? It just looks like the workmen have left some of their equipment behind. Won't be long before passing motorists will use it for target practice and fill it with rubbish from their cars.

One is the bucket above and the other is a mechanical grab - they're meant to celebrate the area's historic involvement with limestone quarrying, but the juxtaposition of black equipment with white gravel (which is not local) is jarring and not at all aesthetically pleasing. On top of that, it was Chipping Sodbury that had the link, not Yate. One of the worst examples of civic art I've seen in a long time.

Collected the rotovator yesterday and managed to successfully smuggle it into the property, but had to fess up later in the day. Starts first time, every time and has had a recent new engine, which appears to be a Chonda - a Chinese copy of a Honda - but no less effective for that. Can't wait to use it in anger and rotovate a shed load of well rotted horse manure into the clay that passes for soil in our garden and grow some veggies in my own veg plot. 


Its main use will be to grade the spoil from the pond, and other tumps, and make it such that I can get the ride-on mower over them.


1 comment:

David Hardwick said...

The Skip Bucket and the Tipping truck are both typical of the types used for mining Celestine in the Yate area in the early 20th Century. The "White Gravel" is actual crushed celestine NOT Limestone. Yate was extracting almost all of the worlds supply of this mineral so to celebrate something so unique to the town is entirely appropriate and the town council should be applauded for doing so. It does however need an interpretation board to explain what it is but that is in hand and that will be put up shortly