CIRCULAR WALL

Built locally.  A circular wall, simply to house the waste bins.

Garden Furniture

A quick trip to get a decent slab of stone and some reclaimed limestone building stone.  A couple of dry attempts to see how best to assemble the garden table and then assemble it using weak mortar.  Quite nice for those summer days and evenings.

Bayness Farm Wall

The wall before I got started:-

And a couple of days later.

Fossil find

Rebuilding a wall close to home I discovered this fern or cycad.  It has survived 80 million years in the stone, being quarried and a couple of hundred in the wall - and my dismantling.

Mike Windle of North Yorkshire Geology trust has examined it and told me it is one of the best he's seen.

Now its on display in my garden. 

Westerdale

At New House Farm Westerdale, I found this interesting wall.
Single width stone but with some incredibly long copes neatly levelled off.  My spade (for scale)  has a long handle making the wall here near six foot tall.

There were numerous walls on the farm with copes of differing length, but non as extreme as this.

The only other similar wall I've seen in the North York Moors is this one at Commondale

First Hedge laying of 2013

1st of September - start of Countryside Stewardship rules for hedge laying, saw me eagerly cutting & laying my first hedge of the season at Low Askew near Cropton.  "Lovely", I thought as I'm often doing this in the freezing wet of darkest winter.  But it was too warm at around 18c and in just a T-shirt I was getting rather too many thorns in my arms for my liking.  The owner didn't want me to remove the fencing, which made me a little apprehensive as I didn't think I'd have enough  room  to work.  But it turned out I had plenty of room and as I only had two small corridors either side of the mixed species hedge to work in I didn't keep loosing my tools as often happens.  An added pleasure were the several buzzards flying around.

 Same location, different hedge.

A length of hedge following laying.

The same hedge one year later on.

Early summer growth one year on.

Regrowth from a newly laid hedge (Low Askew)








(Below).  This is how narrow a Yorkshire style hedge should be laid.

Yorkishire style!  Narrow!!

Whitby Abbey

  

When Henry the 8th got rid of many religious institutions in the 1500s many buildings such as our abbey fell into disuse and their stone was recycled into buildings and walls.

And here we have a rather deliberate attempt to reuse some of the old cut and shaped stones.  You don't often see architectural features in walls so I was pleased I'd spotted this one.