Ahhh. The beautiful English summer; blue skies with little puff ball clouds, a lovely cooling breeze as respite from the sun’s pounding rays. We should be so lucky. No, what we have this year is rain. And lots of it. Rain which has kindly fallen in abundance and created a really lovely, naturally occurring, “mud feature”. It mainly concentrates around the shower, thus providing us with one of life’s many ironies. You go in to wash the mud off, then step back out into the mud. So this week, our instructions were to build a path to the shower. Shame really, I thought we were building a forest railway. Like a sort of stannah forest lift.
Of course, the path to the shower should not be derided. It is like the path to enlightenment, what with cleanliness being next to godliness or something. Anyway, this particular part of the wood seems to attract water and, what with it being clay, it sort of sits on top. Waiting. You can’t dig it; it just sticks to the shovel, so a path was laid. Scraps and cast offs for making three foot “sleepers” with two by four lengths layered like bricks in a stagger, for the rails. Time for the rolling stock? Alas, no. Planks left over from cladding the barn, cut to size and laid on the rails, will finish the path off.
We did what you can see in the picture, all fairly quickly as there quite a few of us there. Allison and son Oscar were working hard along with some of the usual regulars and, what with it not actually raining, it turned out to be a good day.
With any luck, that will be a finished path by now, so I shall take a picture of it to complete the story.
The clad barn, off cuts of which we used on the path and the oven which will cook anything. The pizzas from this oven, you cannot fault. Unless they have anchovies on.
