Our turf roof is going to be cut from the hay meadow that our plot occupies. We’ve pegged out the roof turf and here Lachlan is kindly topping the weeds for us. We’ll have all those lovely traditional hay meadow flowers on our roof - in a year’s time.
The first major delivery to the plot has been of 52 tonnes of 75mm down crusher run for the driveway. Andy is driving the Trust tractor and trailer. After this we relevelled the stone revetment that edges the driveway with our new toy - a water level and I subsequently raised the level of the revetment by about 750mm to make the 1 in 7 gradient required by our planning permission. After the 52 tonne delivery - in 4 tonne loads from the island quarry we looked at our calculations for stone and ordered another 220 tonnes of 75mm. This is now on site awaiting levelling. We will surface the driveway and parking areas with Type 1 - probably from the mainland as the dolerite in the island quarry is very hard and stable and the fines do not rot down and bind particularly well. Dolerite takes ages to weather in too. It is great as a base material but the surfacing needs to bind really well.
Much digging took place during July. I spent about 8 days in dry sunny weather with Ian’s digger doing ten hour days. Here we have just started to clear the piles of topsoil from the archaeological excavation and from clearing the driveway and parking areas. Most of this has been used to bank up the area behind the Land Rover and to retain the driveway stone revetment. We can’t do much until we have the driveway and parking areas in and the shed built. As I am working on both island fish farms and we are pretty busy this will probably take until the end of September, maybe longer.
