| It's November, and winter is nearly upon us: nice bright sunshine today, but the wind was very cold!
First job of the day was to get the dumper started, and bring a load of old stone up from the leftovers of the wharf, to be used as hardcore in the gateway - it's been getting very boggy, what with the cattle being marched in and out. This is one of those lovely jobs that benefits the landowner, and benefits us: we will all be able to negotiate the gateway more easily if we improve it a bit. I missed the traditional starting of the dumper, as I was on car park duty, redirecting arriving members away from the car park, as there will be dredging going on. But here's Roy with the first load of stone: 
"At the kerb: HALT! Look right, look left:" ....send an assistant with a high-vis bib (that's me, by the way) out onto the road to warn the traffic, and off we go! 
Having successfully negotiated the road, Roy tips the stone carefully into the gateway. 
Vic is just checking in case there's anything edible at the bottom of the dumper. 
Right! Drystone walling! Phil and Graham start on a low wall to edge the ditch, while Vic, Jim and Malcy get to work flattening out the heap. 
There, that's much better. Roy inspects the handiwork. He decides it's ready for a couple of loads of dredgings to settle it down... 
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....and here is Bob, already getting going on dredging the section up to the road.
"Oh yes," says Roy, "that's just what we need for the gateway. I'll bring the dumper up." 
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| Meanwhile, the rest of us have been sent over the road, through the much-improved gateway and into the windswept field to move the compound that we built just a couple of weeks ago..... it's become apparent that we didn't go sufficiently far from the road, and now the leaves are falling from the hedging, the equipment can be seen from the road. In order to guard against casual vandalism, we have been instructed to move the compound further down the field.
S'Funny, it took us a lot longer to get the posts in, than it did to get them down! Here's Jim and Roy loading up the trailer. 
Graham supervises Vic rolling up the barbed wire. "Just think of it as a very large roll-mop, Vic." 
Vic guards his roll-mops during their journey up the field. Alternative caption: Vic pushing the trailer. 
Right! New location has been chosen and roughly paced out, now we have to bash the scrub back to the hedgeline. Terrible pangs of deja vu all round. 
"Haven't we done all this before?" says Jim, plaintively. 
At 11 o'clock, we stop for two minutes' silence. 
But what's this? A bull has sneaked up on us while we weren't looking. Keith is sent to talk sternly to it. 
At last, it gets the idea and goes back through the gap into the big field. And yes, I am indeed cowering behind the tractor to take the photos. Well, I don't like cattle very much, and he kept looking at me! (the bull, not Keith). 
The fence posts are up in their new positions (I missed out the bonking and straining, thought you'd know what that was about by now) and Vic paces it out one more time. "I think it's too big?" he says. No, we used Phil's metric legs to measure it. 
Keith discusses bull-luring strategy with Phil (and his metric legs) while the rest of us play around with barbed wire. 
At this point I gave up for the day as the wind was bitingly cold, (Nady, be glad that you chose not to come out today - it was very cold!) and left the rest of the gang to finish the enclosure. Ah well, some days, half a day is enough! |