In July 2013 I moved into a 134 year old terrace house. The house had been beautifully restored but the same couldn’t be said for the garden. On the plus side it wasn’t overgrown and the fences were in good repair; it also had a large structure at the end of the garden which had been rendered and painted (more on that later). On the minus side it was mind-numbingly dull.
One of the first things that I did was to add a shed, to accommodate garden tools, brewing equipment and various other paraphernalia. Curse you, Victorian house builders for your lack of foresight in not supplying garages. I’d like to say that I put up the shed single handed. That would be a lie. My friend who I’d enticed with promises of beer to follow actually did most of the work while I stood around offering useless advice. By the 11th August the garden looked like this:
Blank canvas or boring?
I’m generally happy with most gardening tasks, but I don’t like mowing lawns. While it is possible to achieve an almost meditative state mowing a large area of grass, the same can’t be said for a small patch. The balance between getting the mower out, doing the mowing and then putting the mower away again is not sufficient to achieve a Zen-like bliss. Besides, my new garden wasn’t big enough for a lawn and the number of plants that I had in mind, so it had to go. It also solved the puzzle of where on earth would a I keep a lawn mower anyway?
Luckily I know a man with a turf remover. I asked him nicely to take my lawn away, and he did. And then it started to rain. And rain. And rain. For months on end. In between the almost relentless downpours I did manage to get outside and start digging. I was pleased to find that the soil was a good loam and that it didn’t have too many rocks in it. OK, there were lots, but five runs to the tip saw the back of them. I now had my very own patch of mud.
Mud
The next step was to add a path. I knew that I wanted Cotswold chippings, with their warm yellow colouring, so I checked on the websites for Wilkes, B&Q, Homebase and various garden centres to get some idea of the cost. How much?! After deciding that I didn’t want to take out a second mortgage for a simple path in my small garden, I figured out that there must be a cheaper way.
I called in at the excellent timber merchants in Witney, C J Clarke, to start to find out about path edgings. A helpful man advised me that I needed gravel boards, told me that they had the wood in stock and cut it to size while I waited. I asked him if he knew where I could get some chippings. He suggested Smith & Sons at Gill Mill in Ducklington, not far from where I live. That appealed because it meant that I could buy locally sourced stone. I rang them and the second helpful man of the day was kind enough not to laugh when I described what I wanted. They run an industrial-scale stone extraction operation; the sorts of quantities that people normally buy from them are for large building and road construction products and not for piddly little garden paths,
He was kind enough to point me in the direction of AWBS who buy from Smith & Sons. I checked their website. They certainly had the type of chippings that I wanted. But they also had a lot of useful advice on materials for paths and their characteristics and how to make them. I changed my mind to shingle. They had a very useful calculator which worked out the quantity of material needed based on path area and depth. So now I knew how many bags of shingle I needed. I rang them to check on delivery. There must have something in the air that day because helpful man number 3 told me that not only did they have a special 5-bags-for-the-price-of-4 offer on, but that if I bought in bulk instead of in bags I would get my shingle even cheaper. So I placed the order there and then. That gave me enough time to dig out the bed for the path, and install my gravel boards and some sheets of path membrane.
The following day my shingle arrived as promised. I now had one very large bag of shingle sitting on the pavement outside my house. I haven’t mentioned that I live in a mid-terrace. Moving half a ton of shingle through a carpeted house using only a slightly dodgy wheelbarrow is a character forming experience. But in the end it was done faster than I expected. I was able to put the shingle straight down onto the path bed and after an afternoon of sweating and cursing I had a path.
The shining shingle path
And then it rained some more. And some more. And some more. And the days got shorter. An lo! it was Winter and darkness and desolation fell upon the land and it was time to sit inside in front of the fire and drink cider (about which there will be more in a later post to this blog) and dream of the Spring.
In case you’re wondering about the mysterious structure at the end of my garden, I hadn’t forgotten. Newland, the area of town in which I live, used to be separate from the rest of Witney. It had its own market, shops, inns and various other facilities and distractions sufficient to provide for the good people of the area and to keep them away from the fleshpots of Witney town. One of those facilities was a bakery and it is that, according to my older neighbours, which is the building which now borders my property. According to British History Online “In 1932 the [Witney] urban district was further expanded into neighbouring parishes, absorbing Cogges village on the east, together with built-up areas along Newland and Cogges Hill…”. I might set up a Newland separatist movement and fight for our freedom.
Craig Peppiatt 