Up

The reason I’ve not written very much lately is that I’d rather be doing something else. I’d rather be building a house. I’ve had a perfectly fine time picking apples. And grapes. And pepper. And eating a very large and very fine lunch in the company of a great designer, his brother and one of the great illustrators – more of which soon.

And those tons of grapes and apples picked a fortnight ago – more than a week later than normal thanks to the cool summer – have begun their gentle fermenting ascent into wine and cider. It’s been a good month.

I’ve also been made very content by people doing what they do very well. The team working on this project is really quite extraordinary (of which more, soon) but alas, my ‘skill’ set – cooking, table tennis, pool, armpit farting, Scrabble, writing books and taking snaps – places me outside their field of usefulness.

Their insistence on using people who know what they’re doing, means the build is ahead of schedule. Given the time of year and having to excavate to over 4 metres for the basement, this is miraculous.

There have been two big diggers and four dumpers lifting and removing the blend of topsoil ‘underlain by stiff (dry) to soft (saturated) high plasticity orangish and reddish brown slightly sandy clays with variable amounts of fine to coarse gravel and cobbles’ that lies beneath.

These few words from the geotechnical survey – summing up millions of years of gentle agglomeration – told us we had to build a solid raft on which to sit the buildings rather than just simple foundations, that the layer of cobbles a metre or two down could be carefully removed and incorporated into the raft for the house, and most entertainingly, that the subsoil is the perfect medium to mix with a little sand and straw to make cob, a traditional building material used since time began here in the south west.

So, all change: the barn – where we’ll be running courses, holding events, processing and selling produce, and making booze – is going to be built from cob. What we excavate gets mixed with straw and turned into a building: what a beauty.

But that’s for another month. First, down we go. You might think this is all weighty diggers roughly walloping out a crater; not a bit of it. This is proper craft, to measurements and levels described by lasers. Yet for all the precision, there’s something fantastically brutal about creating a huge shoebox, with steels holding the sides from the very real prospect of collapse. It’s a dangerous and beautiful business.

A blinding of sand perfects the horizontal plane and prevents sharp edges puncturing the waterproofing membrane that sits above it. Steels add rigidity, before a thin layer of concrete is carefully loaded by digger, into the corners and edges, then levelled in sections.

The house awaits a little concrete, as soon as the weather dries enough to make it safe for the lorry, but for the barn at least, the direction of progress reversed this week: blocks and blockworkers (an old friend from primary school included) have arrived.

A few feet of blocks, and we’ll have a base on which to build the cob walls. Incredibly, in less than two days, and in the drizzle, the thick footings are chest high.

I’m genuinely marvelling at what’s being achieved.

Up we go.