Our containment of the scarp side of our house’s garden is proceeding quite well.

We have decided, upon advice, to erect two walls, terraced one above the other across areas which have been left without proper restraint because of lack of wall.

Here is wall no. 1 constructed with some pretty hefty breeze blocks each weighing around 30 kilos and with six rows of blocks.

Wall no. I has been now been infilled on its inward side providing a good foundation upon which to site wall no. 2. As in all these Apennine projects the most important thing is to find the bedrock and then build upon it. Fortunately for us not only is our house built upon solid rock (as in all these former traditional farmhouses but unfortunately not so much the case with new-build) but we are well surrounded by good strata of the stuff.

The next stage will be to build wall no. 2 that will stretch across the area from which a previous wall had collapsed in the dim and distant past.

This project isn’t just to help protect our house from any landslides. It is also ensuring that a chunk of our mountain side does not collapse.  So I feel we are also contributing to an environmental project servicing the community and saving our beautiful hills from subsiding under a deluge of rain. Clearly we are now in the throes of climate change: temperatures are increasing and the collision between air currents is getting even more violent contributing to sudden storms, creating flash-floods and water-logging the soil. Luckily for our area we have not been subjects to the disastrously ill-though out cementification which has afflicted so many other parts of a relatively recently industrialised country like Italy: her surplus water can still flow safely away if drainage channels are properly maintained

Undoubtedly the awful landslides occurring as a result of the megalithic floods in Emilia Romagna to the north of us helped concentrate our minds. We decided to act now and realised that if we did it would clearly save us a lot of money and, more important a lot of anxiety.

The costs are contained (we trust) and are certainly not excessive. If we consider what might have happened if we hadn’t acted in time then we are practising enormous economies.

The weather today has stopped being somewhat dull and miserably unpredictable. The sun has shone most of the time now and the earth is drying out making working on this project a lot easier.

I shall certainly appreciate Tom Snout more now. That’s the fellow who acted ‘wall’ in Shakespeare’s’ Midsummer Night’s Dream’. For us, however, ‘wall’ is not an impediment to a lovers’ tryst. Rather it is encouraging us to live together a little longer without falling down a mountainous precipice!