So long ago that we can hardly remember it, at the first site visit with Mary, in fact, when we decided on the site, she said, "But if there is peat under there the engineer won't let us build on it." The digger finally went on site last Monday, or perhaps Tuesday, after the spare part from Japan, the lack of which prevented the start on 13 August, had arrived. When we went past on Wednesday, returning from a few days at the Other Place, we stopped off and admired the huge great drive that has now been carved out of the entrance spinney, carefully avoiding the oak, as instructed. There was no one working, though, at 10.30 ish; and there was a rather deep wallow full of water at the meadow end of the track, which ought to have warned us something was up.
Later, when we had turned a telephone on and got a signal, we received a carefully worded message from Mary to say that PEAT had been found and an urgent site meeting was required. And she duly arranged it forthwith; and we turned round just as we were about to get on to the A9, and went back.
Alistair Fraser, the builder, is jolly nice and so is Alex Sutherland the immensely experienced digger man. They both come surrounded by the praises of all the local people we have asked for advice; and they have the sort of self confidence that people get from knowing that they do a thing well. When I arrived (Roy went back to Tomdoun for Mary) they were standing beside a new hole, about 3 metres deep, looking sorrowful. It was beautiful shiny smooth dark brown peat right down to the bottom, and further, for all we knew to the contrary, and ominous little plopping noises from the bottom were not rats but moist morsels dropping off as the water began to run in. It looked rather delicious, like some of the earth in Narnia that the trees ate in The Magician's Nephew. "The whole site wobbles when the digger drives over it." As we saw later. So that was a no-go. An off the top of the head calculation later indicated that the cost of infill alone, were we to try to build on the original site, would amount to £60,000, if it could not be found somewhere on site and had to be bought in.
So we wandered off in the wake of the digger and chewed up a bit of the bog across the little stream. Better, but not good; fill that hole. Up to a pretty little knoll, formerly designated as part of The View From The Sitting Room, where A and A had chewed things up a bit some years ago when wondering whether to buy the site. (Presumably at around the time we actually did buy it.) The digger munched a bit more, found stones, real earth, no rock (which is, rather anti-Biblically, a bad thing, apparently): good stuff. The digger wandered off on its own a bit and found that the underlay of the little knoll is good moraine. So we all admired that hole before it got filled in again.
And lo, it was decided, no fuss, to move the house to the knoll. Mary paced it out, had a short fierce battle on our behalf about keeping the damage to the environment and the destruction of trees to a minimum (it was nice to witness that); various discussions took place about the orientation, the space that will be required for the statutory West Highland straggle of ratty little outhouses; we asked for a costing of the extra expense of another 100 yards or so of access track; Mary said she would clear it all with the planners; and that was that.
We are a little worried at Alex's propensity to see a hillock with trees on it and identify it as a good source of road-making material; and it seems that rather more of the entrance spinney will be devoured in this way than we would like. But what do you do when someone is obviously an expert? We will need gravel. And I THINK it was only a tease when he said that a couple of branches really ought to come off the oak. Mary knows that she is going to have an ongoing battle to make sure that the building site and the access drive are both set into the land rather than being built up. Rather her than us; that is what we pay her for.
All this is Roy's fault. He has been worrying that the bedrock will be too near the surface to bury the sewage treatment plant properly.
Moral: when building in the Highlands, it is as well to have a really large site. Or, alternatively, dig trial pits right at the beginning.
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It's a foul bog. Now with added peat. However the good news is that you will have multiple sources of burnable material (trees, peat, compressed midges from the MidgeBuster that I'm SURE you're going to invest in) when you're cut off from civilisation by snow, floods, rampaging red deer etc.
Actually, it is not foul at all. It is very beautiful, like very fine chocolate. And the newspapers are full of how Scotland has the world's last remaining peat bogs, an important location for locked-up carbon. So I am glad to be able to preserve it. Also, as I have mentioned before, it has some nice flowers, thoough I have been a little reticent about those in case the flower-watch people slapped a preservation order on them.
Trial pits are always a good thing. I used to make my livelihood doing trial pits.
hello this is a test as i can't remember what i was going to write
trial pits sound fun. will the family advocate suggest bringing back justice by combat
Women wrestling in peat?
ooooh yes let's
Doing trial pits used to involve me getting wet and muddy, and all without falling over or anyone else involved. Except perhaps some nice kind man with a JCB who would buy me a drink in the pub at lunchtime.
Did you dig them by hand or just direct the JCB?
Our peat trial pit was the size of a grave and the height of a tall room, and soggy peat all the way down. Not the sort of thing to get lost in, for fear of becoming a Bog Person.
Sometimes it was a man with a double spade. That would have been for CBR testing at depths of 0.5 and 1 metre. The trial pits were normally dug by machine, as we would keep going until we found natural ground. So could be 3metres.
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