Monday was the day we had all been waiting for… the removal of ‘clay mountain’. It was all organised on the hoof and the digger driver, whom we all call Sylvester Stallone (can you see the resemblance below?) didn’t actually start until 3.30pm ish.
Our neighbour, Milerad (Mico) has been an invaluable help, trucking up huge loads of sand and helping Miso clear his materials away and he has had so much practise on the land he now effortlessly moves his truck around the narrowest strips of land and tightest corners. Here he is showing off for the camera…
The digger piled his truck up with chunks of the clay mountain and he tipped it into the hole around the building (here, beautifully supervised by Mil!):
Around the pipe work for the airflush urinals, Steve had to get in there with a spade and pack the pipe by hand so it wasn’t knocked or wrecked by tipping great lumps randomly onto it:
Once the earth was all put back in around the building, the digger man drove his machine over it a few times to compact it and flatten it out:
When there was no more places for the earth to go around the building, Mico started trucking it up to the top piece piece of land. There was a big sloping terrace beside the road that we figured we could fill in to provide a flatter area, maybe as an overflow parking area as it has good access from the road, or even a place for camper van to pitch. So, clay mountain was moved and this is what it looked like at the end of the day:
Everything stopped at 6.30pm so the digger man could go home and fill up his water tank – the water has only been on for an hour or so every day for the last week or so and rushing home to get water when it’s there has become everyone’s priority!
The guys were back on the land first thing in the morning on Tuesday and by the time I arrived it was all over – in the end, quite an anti-climax… I had (naively) thought that when the clay mountain was removed the site would be restored to it’s former glory and miraculously, a grassy green terrace would reappear. This is in fact what it looks like:
It’s better but it will still take some time for the land to recover and there is still some spade work to remove the excess clay. The good news is that the new clay mountain up top is much less conspicious. Here is after the digger had flattened it all down…
And here’s the view from the road – hardly notices does it?!
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