There was always a wall here, but in days gone by I think the wall collapsed and what is left is hidden under the grass in the bottom field. So now is our opportunity to re-build, but this time not to have it too close to the edge of the escarpment. It is the same height as the back wall (and the sheep pen) in the top field. It will come around to the right of the large oak tree and then join up with the existing wall in the bottom field. This will then enclose the bottom field while not obscuring the views from the house.
All of the stone has been moved by hand with the aid of our old dumper. Compared to some of the other walling we have done, this has been quite a quick job – mainly due to much better building stone.
We have always dug all of the footings for our dry stone walls by hand – not this time! We just happened to have access to a machine (and a man who knows how to drive it). It only took a couple of hours to do what might have taken a couple of days by hand. We used our old trusty dumper to move the soil elsewhere. It is probably a good 30-40m run.
We are using our old dumper to move this stone from the mountain to the other end of the field. The stone is pretty reasonable walling stone (even if some of it is a little big!), so the wall goes up pretty quickly.
When we had the digger here we used it to lift some of the bigger stones into the dumper. I then dumped these along the wall to go into the foundations of the wall. Although many of them were too heavy to lift, I can just about roll them into position. Zep is lying in the grass by the red trug in the background.
This is the view from the other side of the wall looking up from the bottom field. It doesn’t look too bad, although it does feel bigger and taller when viewed from this side.
Almost there! Which is just as well since we don’t seem to have much stone left! It is amazing to think that most of this wall used to the old barn.