The Great Wall of Wells

Hi All

HOORAY!….time for a minor celebration…I have broken up and moved all the fallen pieces of concrete and bricks into the skip and had it removed. A pretty major achievement, if I do say so myself.

We are still waiting on word from the insurance company… who are apparently waiting on the engineer’s report.

The wall cleanup has had its fair share of little surprises. In amongst the rubble I have found some strange bits and pieces. Including a Fiat hub cap, a wrought iron bed frame, numerous pieces of glass and even a few intact bottles.

Most of the bottles are pretty everyday ordinary, But one caught my eye and I thought if we can date the bottle we can possibly put a date on when the wall was built.

I put my super sleuth wife Michelle onto the case and after quite a bit of Googling, she had a win.

The bottle is a Gilbey’s Gin bottle from somewhere in the 1940-50 range, which means that the wall is potentially 80-odd years old! This fits in with the age of our house, but we were under the impression that the wall was probably built to terrace the block behind us…which wasn’t built on until much later (we think the 1970’s).

This image shows the route the majority of concrete blocks took to get to the skip. The following clip will give you an idea of how much ‘fun’ it was (please ignore the dodgy colour of the clip…I forgot to change the white balance from underwater mode :)

I think I may have mentioned in a previous post that there was no wheelbarrow access. Well, after the amount of effort required to try and break the concrete into carry-size pieces I decided there HAD to be a way. Thanks to one of Dad’s old plastering planks and a bit of dicking about…a track of sorts was made. There is no way it is going to work for uphill trips, but it got the rubbish away.

Until next time…

Cheers