The well, in the workshop, crept over its sill for the first time in our history, and the first time since there’s been a wooden floor in there, but the water just flowed along the original concrete cow-poo channels and on its way. I have often wondered what would happen in a downpour and hoped this would be the result. If I had covered the floor with concrete, all the machines would have been swimming. I guess the slurry pit’s getting a good clean out.
A neighbour, from a farm above, came to tell us there was water over the road at the quarry. He wouldn’t have it, that this was just an exceptional overflow, insisting that I’d put a fence post into a culvert that he built aeons ago (no doubt without consulting Ralph) and had never maintained.
Hey ho. Monica took a walk up there and concluded there was no problem. This walk was already scheduled and the kitchen already filled with beekeepers, from the local group, who’d come to advise whether to move the apiary up to the quarry. The weather today probably influenced their advice but I think the hives stay where they are for another year. As a bonus, though, Monica was offered a mechanical hoist so that she could set up a dumbwaiter to lift her bits and pieces over the wall to the site. That’ll be a novel project.
The waterfalls opposite formed a continuous ribbon down the gully for most of the morning. There’s a six-foot curtain fall, right at the top, where the stream flows over a twelve foot wide slab. One of these centuries, that slab is going to be cut loose and crash downwards. Won’t everyone be glad of the trees on t’Other Bit that day?
Project Pigsty took a step backwards when four hundred second-hand bricks arrived from Kevin’s renovations, yesterday. They’re old, soft, local bricks and hence preferable for the forge build to the hard Cheshire bricks I was going to use. When I take down the Shippen end wall, those old bricks will be used to build the bread oven so I do have five hundred spare bricks. Perhaps I can build a pottery kiln?
I used the saw horses I made for timber framing as temporary supports for the rhubarb bed. Of course, Monica’s oak floor requirement has arrived out schedule and I wasn’t keen to build more horses. Then I remembered that I was given, as a freebie when I tossed a couple of eBay anvils in the back of the truck, four massive steel horses that will be ideal for timber framing. The guy was an engineer in the printing trade and had spec’d and built them to support a twenty ton roller he was building. I think that gives me a bit of leeway, given the whole barn frame will be around twenty tons. That roller went on to print all of the Harry Potter books so I’m sure the stands will be magic.
The fire’s on and dinner’s starting to smell good as I draw the curtains against the weather.