Good fences make good neighbours.
Robert Frost
Tuesday 13th was sunny and a little warmer than 'crisp', so after lunch, I filled up the chainsaw and went for a ditch-peeling session. It's really jungly on the far side. I was sweeping through some brash to get at the big stuff and hopped the chain off its bar [dang!]. It's annoying because with PPE ear-defenders it takes a while to register the whining change in note in which time the stationary chain has been grinding against the drive cog. To get the chain back in its groove, it is often necessary to file off some burrs; which means trudging back home to the shop for tools and tooling. On the way back home I heard [the son of] my neighbour-above tractor-tricking just behind our garden.
After some frustrating bricolage on the saw, I fired it aside and offered to stand in a gap for my neighbour. "stand in a gap" is the level of competence expected of a 4 y.o. child. What I actually said is "If you do the heavy lifting with the front-loader, I'll endeavour to stop the stone falling off the top of the build . . . I'll just fetch a bigger [iron] bar than yours, and my own shovel". Dry-stone wall building is nearer the top in my bag of competence than, say, sheep-shearing. Accordingly we spent the next tuthree hours, until bad light stopped play, piling up stones in an orderly way to a) keep the sheep in b) allow enormous tractors, trailers, trucks to sweep up the [tiny, rough, gravel] lane and into the field. The result is not to be ashamed of:
It's actually the second wall built on that corner. When we blew-in 30 years ago this Spring, a farmer from round the hill bought the distal 25 acres we couldn't afford. One of his first tasks was to back-fill the tiny narrow entrance to the fields behind our house and open a new tractor-friendly gateway. The tractors of 1996 weren't MF35 tiny, but they were smaller than the 200+ horse-power behemoths favored today. Back in the day, Neighbour would herd his sheep along the tarmac from his home place 5km West of here in order to turn them loose on the 12ac/5ha field that he created from a clatter of much smaller, rougher, paddocks that we couldn't afford. Back then he had help: childer, his bestie-next-door and even an elderly retainer called Dan.
With the skills of a Roman legionary, Dan repaved the steepest part of the track up beside our back garden. All we supplied was a few loads of sandy 'yellow clay' which hereabouts lies under a skim of black peaty top-soil. We had a surplus of the stuff because John-the-digger was getting a Saturday's backhoe work out of us pretty much once a month. Digging the back of the house out of the slump of the hill for starters. When he finished the road surface - which has survived two floods which washed out the rest of the lane - he started work on the gateway. Dan wasn't the quickest, but he was careful, methodical, painstaking and skilled. About five years ago, Dan's handsome piece of vernacular engineering was shoved out of the way to facilitate a contractor's boastfully over-specified machinery.
Storm Darragh felled out a mountain-ash Sorbus aucuparia from our ditch so it blocked the lane. The first thing I did the next morning was start to clear the right-of-way. It took me a while, but by Christmas I had cut it back the the stump and propped the stump up against the ditch so it could fall out any further. It was, I thought, out of everybody's way. But Neighbour-above threw a tantrum one day and tore the stump from the retaining wall bringing down half the ditch along with it. We had words, but didn't get too angry . . . because, like the sped arrow, you cannot recall [shouty] spoken words. In August, Sean O'MF35 [whom prev] came by with a cutie-pie Kubota mini-digger and we rebuilt the wall so it was again chest-height and more-or-less vertical [with a slight batter on it to settle back into the bank rather than totter forward into the roadway]. Not starting from a clean foundation, but starting off doing some dental work to get back to solid wall at bottom and both sides, it took us about 5 hours. The result is not too shabby functional [it's still on me to tidy up the fence!]:
PS In contrast to an iron-bar and a shovel, a chainsaw is a reet ould prima-donna. Delicate and attention-seeking. Last time I borked the chain, in the aftermath of Storm Darragh, it was cutting through a fallen tree-trunk as fat as the chain-bar was long. This time, it was twerking it against some twigs. I should maybe pay attention to myself and clear brash&briar by hand, keeping the noise-maker for the big stuff.
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