Spring cleaning and other excitements!

A bright clear day in February with no rain and so the family decided to tackle the farmyard for
a much needed spring clean with some repair of the walls around the yard.

This blogging is a fine art I'm afraid when the page suddenly shuts down when I am in full flow and haven't a clue how to rectify things!
So bear with me if this is a semi-repeat of the last posting.
Will and Karen, as his apprentice, have been repairing "nips" and gaps in the walls around the farm yard. Jobs like drystone walling just have to be done when the weather is better - there is nothing more depressing than walling in the teeth of the winter winds and with rain soaking through to the skin!


This corner of wall was knocked out by a clumsy delivery driver and took William the better part of an afternoon to repair - and he is a very good waller, like his Dad.
The small clean bit of wall lower down the picture is technically a "nip" but often takes longer than a large gap to rebuild- in this case Will had to pull quite a bit more of the wall out to repair the seemingly small nip.

He's done a grand job on the corner - always tricky to do.


Not to be outdone, Nic is finishing off and neatening a section of wall just through the gate at the top of the yard.


There is nothing like young enthusiasm and Will and Karen decided that the sad old well in the centre of the yard needed Nic to rebuild it and they would level out the ground around it.
So, to little Will's excitement, daddy got out the digger and dumper and set to, with Karen doing the fine levelling and stone picking.

Meanwhile I finally got the dreadful old tractor shed tidied and, although poor Nic was devastated to part with his"treasures and spares" to the scrapman, he had to admit that it was a vast improvement. In fact the tractor shed and garage are positively attractive now! Farmers always keep things that will "come in handy" which mostly looks - and is- junk - even bent nails had been kept for straightening. In fairness, times in the past were even harder than now for hill farmers and nails were a precious commodity.

Our lovely neat tractor shed.

A neat pile of scrap waiting to go to the scrapman- what would we do without him!

Behind is the lovely bit of walling that Will tackled with Karen as an apprentice.
Karen did the filling in of the middle which used to fall to the young apprentice waller.