NEWTS and badgers, a fence 1km long and 20m underground, and Stone Age weapons – it’s all in a day’s work for engineer and king of the road Doug Mackie.

For he’s the man in charge of building the £52 million Alderley Edge Bypass, and probably the best qualified as he worked on the original Wilmslow Bypass until the project ran out of money in 1996.

The 62 year-old has come back to finish the job he started many moons ago, but, just like then, it’s been far from plain sailing for Doug and the 80 staff assigned to construct the five km road.

Water has been the first major hurdle. Inspectors discovered that the main tract of land to be excavated is mainly peat four metres deep with a very high water table.

Doug said: "We sent a truck down to test the soil and had to pull it back up immediately because it just started disappearing before our very eyes."

To get around that sinking feeling calls for jelly, and lots of it.

The lads have drafted in a huge fence 1km long and 20 metres deep filled with jelly, not the type you have with ice cream, to surround the whole project and keep the water from the outlying fields at bay.

And at 800mm thick, it should hopefully do the trick.

It wasn’t only the soil itself that threw up a few interesting questions for the construction team, but also the secrets of what is contained beneath the earth too.

Intial forays into the peat have turfed up some interesting archeological finds.

Already, before the major earthwork has begun, Stone Age flint has been found which could indicate the presence of a settlement of some kind or even of primitive hunting around The Edge.

The find is of such importance that Birse, the company incharge of the project, has drafted in an archeologist from Chester to supervise further excavations.

If the peat on Lindow Moss is anything to go by, who knows what the diggers will find lurking in the murky, damp soil in Nether Alderley.

And its digging that will be the main task of the team for the next three years, by popular demand.

Given the choice between bridges over the railway line and road, and tunnels under, Alderley Edge and Nether Alderley residents were in favour of the subterranean method of crossing.

There will be a tunnel under Brook Lane , which will close from March 9, and Welsh Row will close for two years from February 23, whille the underground construction work is carried out.

All that burrowing is going to throw up a lot of muck, which is going to be used as three metre mounds at the side of the road, and because it’s peat, the 48,000 trees that will be planted will grow faster because its more fertile.

The tunnels are going to be heavily supported underneath, "because The West Coast Mainline trains go at 125mph, so we don’t want the track to go down", Doug explained.

With all this digging there’s bound to be noise, and the earthwork gets done in the summer when the weather’s supposedly nice. So unfortunately noises will be heard by the locals from 7.30am to 7.30pm, the daylight hours of summer work, but thankfully there will be very limited weekend working.

Sewage pipes and gaslines also need to cross the construction site and effluent from AstraZeneca goes into a tank 12.5 metres wide and 14 metres deep before being pumped under the bridge.

The project appears daunting to the untrained eye but Doug is ready for the challenge.

He said: "You get more grief resurfacing roads than you do building a road because you are in the front line dealing with the public.

"We haven’t built a decent sized scheme for a while. This is going to be an exciting and challenging experience both for me and all the men on the team."

More in this week's Wilmslow Express ...