I took these photos recently of walls I repaired last autumn.
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This tall dyke was slightly unusual, round here anyway. It was capped with great boulders used as coverstones and sweetened off with smaller shards of stone and lime. Putting great weight on the wall like this worked extremely well. It was over 100 years old, 5'6 tall and in great condition. This was the only part to collapse. The fallen stone was buried beneath about a foot of rich woodland soil, a corner poking from the ground here and there. In fact, when I started digging, I was not sure the stone was still there. This all suggests that it fell shortly after completion. It was easy to see why. The boulders here were just too ambitious, too heavy for me to lift five feet anyway, and brought the wall down. I put them in lower down and finished the wall with a cope of more modest boulders.
There are plenty ponies on this farm. And that means plenty mushrooms growing on heaps of well rotted manure. There were boletes from the woods as well and I made lots of soup as the fungi fruited over the weeks. We had family up from Cornwall at the time and Aunt Gabrielle was particularly fond of it. Thinking back, I am not sure if I ever did confess that the secret of the sauce was from the horse.
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