Gas Men and Holes in the Ground

After reaching the take-a-breath stage with the plastering, the gas man came this week.  The house has no gas (although next door does) and so they had to fit a new gas supply pipe from the road up to the side of the house where the kitchen will be.  This is quite a long route, and I am grateful that the surveyor stretched his tape measure to do it all for no extra cost.  He was well aware of the issues about not fitting unsightly meter boxes on listed buildings, and had had this debate with his own company many times before.

Of course, when the manager came last week, he had a different idea about the required route, and then the actual workers had their own variation as well.  They have to dig two holes and then use a tool called a mole, which operates on compressed air and burrows under the ground from one hole to another.  In fact, for our property they had to dig five holes and join them up like a dot-to-dot picture.  Then at either end they dug a trench for the connections to the main and the meter box.  This may sound easy and in fact they made fairly light of the issues, but I reckon I was right to be worried about the difficulty of the possible routes.  The job took over two days, and so one night the road was partly blocked by these works; Jane said, "I've never had a road blocked for me before!"

I dug a hole where the meter was to go, partly as I wanted to know how deep the "foundations" of the house were.  The answer was about a foot from the current surface!  In this photo you can see the three bottom courses of stone, which sit on a line of stones laid at right angles, sticking out about four inches from the wall.  It looks as though they laid these longer stones across ways, and then just built the wall on them.  I think this bottom level was pretty much the ground level when it was built.


The gas men found a old wall, in the gateway near our front wall but about a foot into our property and about a foot down.  Despite the availability of local limestone, this wall uses a good amount of granite - where did that come from?

The existing wall is at the top left of the photo, heading down, and the older wall is in the middle just above my toe, highlighted by the low sun.  There was also a possible mediaeval tile fragment as well as a few other bits of pottery, but clearly everything there has been disturbed over the centuries and is out of context.  However, overall, we think it shows that our house is on a very interesting bit of ground (in the archaeological sense), and now Jane wants to excavate the entire garden!