Pickety Pick
Pickety Pick
The rubble and mess outside of the hall is now cleared away and Gary has made a good start on picking out the old mortar to the front of the building. It’s hard going and as the sun comes around he’s managed to get about a third of the way across the front before he starts to get cramp and can still feel the vibration of the pick hitting the wall long after he’s stopped and is making himself a brew and I take over.
It takes the rest of the day but we get it done and bag up the fresh rubble in an attempt to keep the place looking tidy.
I’ve brought the jet washer from home with me and Tom has brought an old juice drum to load up with water from the stream. We’re probably going to go through quite a lot of it to wash out the dust and stony bits from the wall and I’m not that enthusiastic about fetching buckets of water all afternoon so I’ve gone a bit heath-robinson and hooked up an old car battery to a 12v water pump, run a hose pipe into the stream and weighed it down with a stone. At the other end of the pump I’ve attached a thinner tube running all of the way to the drum which starts to trickle in but it isn’t long before we’ve got a decent amount in there ready to connect the jet washer to the generator.
Once the wall is done, we start to spray some of the dust away from the door and it looks like the bit of cobbled path running from the door which we could only see part of actually runs the whole length of the land between the hall and the road, so at some point this bit of land probably did belong to the church. I kind of wished we’d known this when I last spoke to the Land Registry as it would have helped to establish the boundary a little better but at the time, we just had an outline. There are a few small man-hole covers in the road which the jet-washer has revealed so we’ll have to look into that, as it might be something we can connect to going forward. Having some land would definitely have given us more options for siting the waste tank but if nothing else, it gives us one more feature to reinstate once when the rest of the work is finished.
