Pioneering. The sense of adventure as you climb aboard the wooden tall ship to sail the atlantic to settle on the new world!

Well no.

This pioneering involves taking loads of bits of wood, preferably staright and stong and longer than 6 foot, and then tying them together with bits of string to make a "sturdy" structure. All well and good in theory. However, take these two comodities and add seven willing cadets and my own dodgy teaching methods and this is what you get.

Our very first "construction" is not exactly the prime of Ilkly's arcitecture but it did prove that we could indeed produce a self supporting structure of a respectilbe size. We have then continued to produce other structures such as the "greasy pole" which we added an unusual twist by allowing it to swing!

That was good fun but then we decided to go for a more useful item. A Tower. This was built at the Ilkley Carnival and consisted of just three poles and one rope. The tripod is approximatley 12 feet high at the cross point and is very high when your stood ontop of it with your balls in the air (that's juggling balls and clubs)

Any way, we hope to go on and build many, bigger, more interesting and generally better quality (that's not hard) constructions and maybe we can get Cpl Philby to fall off something nice and high!!

Our thanks go to 1st and 3rd Ben Rhydding scout troops who lent us the equipment and Mr Pratt who transported it for us.

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