The Lake Is Being DUG !

So, we have 2 lakes.

Well, honestly the smaller one you’d probably describe as a frog pond, at about 10 metres across.

But the main lake is a decent lake. About 100 metres across, by about 150 metres. It is about 5 minutes’ walk from the house (all within our land).

It is a beautiful lake, and we have gone fishing in it a bit, and enjoyed boating on it.

It was originally dug about 50 years ago. And over the years, it has inevitably silted-up. Silt is the sludge that builds up over time, at the bottom of a lake.

Silt builds up from…

• Mud flowing into the lake with the stream-water coming in,
• Fish poo, and
• Fallen leaves that then compost down and become soil

In the last photo above, on the near left, the light brown colour is the silt and soil being so close to the surface of the water.

Over the years, so much silt has built up, that the lake was no longer deep enough to either fish, go boating or swim.

And vegetation was starting to grow from the silt and show on the surface.

So we have been planning for the last couple of years to empty the lake, let it dry for 1 year fully, then dig it out.

That is a big, scary and expensive project.

But something that needed to be done, if we want to make the lake such that you can properly go…

• Fishing,
• Swimming, and
• Boating

Naturally, being France, lovers of paperwork and beaurocracy as they are, we needed permission to empty it. Tick. Done. So we empty it…

This is a photo of it full…

And more or less from the same position, but empty…

You can see that it is…

• Covered in vegetation already, and
• Not a lot lower without the water in!

That’s because there is so much silt.

This is our farmer neighbour Xavier (trying) to walk across the empty lake bottom.

Then we left it empty for a year, to dry out, so it would be solid enough to dig with a digger.

So that you can see the before-and-after, here is a view of the lake before it was emptied, from the vantage point of the hill…

And now, from the same vantage point, after a year of the lake being empty and drying…

You can see that the bottom of the lake has grown a lot of grass in that year!

Next move – organise an expert digger-driver to come dig it all out. A few years before, I had spoken with a local guy who quoted a few grand to do it. In 2024 I got updated and proper quotes…

But the quote came in at 62,000 Euros to do it! Cough-cough-splutter-splutter!

After much negotiations, changes of suppliers with price reductions to more sensible numbers, and me (Duncan) being as hands-on with the project as possible, we have now got on with the first stage of digging…

Enter ‘Le Digger’ …

(“Pelleteuse” in French, pronounced “pell-terz”, if anyone is interested) …

This is the 15-tonne digger that is heading down to the lake, about to do its magic.

Here is Part 1 of Project Dig-Out…

Then Part 2…

… then Part 3…

For you to get a sequence of lake full > lake emtpy > lake dug-out…

Lake full…

… Lake empty…

And…

Lake empty and dug out…

It is so easy to lose scale here. In that last photo, look at the tiny yellow dot far away, that is the digger.

And in the photo before that, the silver birch trees in the middle are huge, tall mature trees of about 18 metres tall.

So, lake dig-out complete. That’s a wrap.

Now, this is only stage 1 of the lake dig-out project.

Around summer time, Monsieur Le Diggerman will come back and sort out the piles of silt and soil that he has put around the edges, to build up the lake bank edges, so they are higher.

Which means the lake will be deeper.

And then we will build a sluice gate and a water diversion control. This is to switch water coming into the lake, directly into the stream that runs around the edge of the lake. It is a legal requirement and frankly seems rather nonsensical, but this is France. We do what Le Police say.

And yes, in France, they have Lake Police. A whole separate body of Police, purely for lakes. And they have access rights over your land, and unannounced. Which I know from experience – but thats another story.

But stage 1 is complete.

And in the end, we will end up with a stunning lake that is swimable, fishable and boatable.

B…

… E…

… …A.

… … … utiful!

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