A thousand geese a squarking

 A lovely day for a group reunion saw Barry, Rod, Tony, Graham, Chris, Val and myself having a good tidy up at Markenfield. We bashed nettles, we flattened grass, we moved fill and carefully re-ordered stone. All to the tune of hundreds and hundreds of melodious geese, ah what a beautiful sound.

After lunch we moved our efforts to the barn on Hellwath lane, where we were attempting to find a large number of toppers, which we hope will at some point be transported down to the wall by Giles and Rod from the Hall. Many thanks to them for agreeing to undertake the operation. 

Chris quickly installed himself as king of the castle on top of the large pile of rocks only to be usurped by various pretenders. Rod stationed himself at the bottom of the pile and used his large stone axe to bash some order into proceedings.

Thanks to Tony for providing the pictures, especially after my phone decided it didn't want to save the ones I took.

Photos - Tony 

Richard H.
No. Wallers: 7!!!

Ready for a tidy up

Roderick joined Barry and Graham and helped to produce a successful and pleasant day's walling with the weather warm and sunny .  The last stretch of the wall up to the stile is now complete, following another  two courses and some feathering into the previous wall.  It was nearly half past four by the time we got back to the cars. All that's left is 20 metres of toppers to find and place!!  A challenge for next week.

Graham D.

No Wallers: 3

A small delivery

We started out by trying to bring the existing stint to a reasonable height without any further demolition of the existing wall.  Unfortunately there’s not a lot of stone and what there is looks more like rubble than walling stone. 

We plodded on until, mid-morning, our host turned up for a chat and to admit that he’d noticed we didn’t have much stone.  This he rectified to some degree by returning half an hour later with a tractor bucket load of fairly decent stone.

 

 

 

Chris G.

No Wallers: 3

Nearly time for Toppers

Graham and Barry did another fairly slow moving stint at Markenfield moving onto the almost final course.  Definitely looking like a pre topper wall. 

Graham D.
No. Wallers:2

Bovine Art.

On arrival we found the cattle had transformed one of the poles into kinetic art, but had spared the wall. We finished the final course and as you will see struggled with the toppers. Many of the stones did not have the requisite depth to match the previous toppers and there were barely enough of them to finish the job. To try and make them a little less formless we started to round off the bigger stones, but despite taking a lot of care suffered breakages and so took the cowardly executive decision to not dress them and leave them as is until such time as there was enough stone to allow some risk taking.

There appears only enough stone in the remaining untouched part of the wall to rebuild up to about thigh height, so we might have to put in a cheek end and drop the level.

Roderick L.

No. wallers: 2

A duo of Wallers.

 Just Duncan and Graham with further slow but steady progress.  Lovely  morning with threat of heavy rain at lunchtime , which never arrived fortunately.

Graham D.

No. Of Wallers: 2