Hmmm ... no posting on the blog since May 18th eh?  Still not much has happened really has it?  I mean we only started about here ...

well, all right ... here ...

and now we're ... here. 

 

  

Wall 1 is finished, done and dusted and awaits the arrival of Lady Camilla who will allegedly take her seat as queen of the garden sometime this month.

We finally concluded that, in true walling style, we weren't going to have enough stone or that, if we did, it wasn't the right kind (whenever is it?) for making coping stones.  So we threw ourselves on the mercy of our suppliers and asked for some nice 3" to 4" lumps for the purpose. 

What arrived was near double that size and, shall we say, tricky to work into copes.  So we got another lot which this time resembled a heap of broken paving slabs but at least had the advantage of being more workable. 

We ( OK, I) suspect that the stone we would have liked, was delivered instead to a team of professionals who, in four weeks, built several impressive stretches of new wall on the A59 road between Harrogate and Skipton.  Nice job guys, but can we have our stone back please?

We've since learned how to break the big stuff into useful building stone and Wall 2 has been gaining altitude encouragingly as a result.  We 're up to about 24" so far, and if the gang turns out in the same kind of numbers we've been achieving lately, we should meet our completion deadline of Septemberish, although at this stage we're not prepared to specify a year.

We've found the project quite challenging but we're feeling quietly pleased with the end result.  Keeping a good line and batter on a curved wall takes some getting used to but we've all been prepared to admit when something has gone astray and accept a bit of remediation.

By the way ... here's our wildlife monitoring crew hard at work (Attenborough, for a change, is just out of shot)



and here's the result of minutes of painstaking and patient study ...



Awwww!

And finally in the spirit of globalisation and understanding among nations, here's how they build dry stone walls in Turkey ... the whitewash gives me an idea for finishing the North Stainley wall ...  I wonder what colour Farrow & Ball would recommend ... ?