We still have some large piles of stones left over from the original cottage perimeter walls and from the stones that came out of the trench that was dug to install our new water pipe alongside the track from the road. We hope to use up the stones in a number of projects around the garden area. Our first effort was to add a retaining wall to support the wall next to the steep path down to the lower garden.

Here’s how it looks so far. We now have to build a new set of stone steps alongside the wall down to the lower garden.

The lower garden is quite exposed to the prevailing south-westery winds so Gabrielle has built a rustic wind break using a lot of the trimmings from our sycamore and ash trees.

Anna and Nigel can be seen in the background gathering and trimming suitably sized branches for working into the fence.

While the building work was going on, we had our garden tools and a few other items from the original cottage stored in a shed over on the edge of the plot of land. Now that the building work is finished we though it would be good to move the shed out of the line of sight from the living room. Our visitors Anna and Nigel were put to work providing the muscle power to move the shed to its new location. The move was much easier than we expected using some fence posts as rollers.

Nigel and John dug out and levelled the new location next to the garage and the shed was carefully slid into position.

This is the view from the old shed location. Now we need to get the ground prepared for sowing grass seed.