We have boundary walls

After just over 7 weeks of continuous Monday to Friday working from first thing in the morning to the end of daylight in all weathers, Andy has completed our boundary walls, examples, we think, of masonry magic.

We now await Pat and his team fitting the capping stones and the gates, followed by laying the retaining crates and gravel on the drive, with a layer of tarmadam across the entrance shared with our neighbours to finish it off.


Andy works to Pat's aesthetic of 'sharp'. It has continually amazed us that his day starts with something like this:


and, after hours of hammer-on-bolster-chisel tapping and a mix of a dry mortar, he turns it into something like this:


The pedestrian path will in time have a coating of resin-bound gravel and there will be a tiny triangular flowerbed inside the gate.




The outer bed (a planning stipulation limited the height of the boundary wall to aid the sightline for traffic approaching the village) will be an extension to our garden.




The unused stone, a large pile of stone shards and a covered heap of sharp sand are all that remain of Andy's workplace. For most of the time that he was here, he had the somewhat dubious shelter of our gazebo, but that sadly succumbed to a gale a week ago.




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