All done. But it was a real slog. Don’t know why, maybe it was the showery weather. Zep and I had to retreat to the pickup a couple of times when the weather took a turn for the worse. Zep had more sense and stayed in his bed in the cab, even when the rain stopped.
Most of the bricks from the outbuilding are now down in the orchard ready to go into the base of the dry stone wall. However, I cleaned up a few more and have stacked these on the base of the lean-to. I am not sure what these are going to be used for, but there are enough already in the orchard.
The old store-room appears to have flagstones on the floor. A number of them appear to be broken – some no doubt happened when we took down the brick walls, but many of them look like they have been broken for some time. I have removed one of them and they appear to have been laid directly onto an ash floor (which was the standard approach at the time). I will take up a couple of the broken ones this week and have a go with the metal detector. Anything that is under the floor has probably been there for a couple of hundred years.
The bases of the three toilets are now exposed. They appear to have been built with a smooth cement concave floor. There were hinged wooden doors at the back of each of the toilets. I can only imagine that the doors were used to scoop out the contents. Yuck!
Just the base of the store-room and the toilet block left. There is one large upright stone left that is too big for me to move on my own.
One of the flagstones was broken – it probably got damaged when we took down the brick wall – so I have removed it. As expected, it is laid directly onto an ash base – the standard approach in the old days.
No idea how these toilets were meant to work, but with a wooden hinged door at the back, I can only guess that this was used to scoop out the contents. Yuck!
This large Avery weight was on the roof. 56lb is a standard weight for potato bags (in the old days anyway!). It is heavy!