Walled In

Walled in? Walled in like a seventeenth century novice nun deprived of her handsome secret cavalier and immured in a convent ruled by a merciless mother superior. Walled in like a nameless prisoner in an iron mask locked away in a dank dungeon as a pretender to the throne. Walled in like a vast kingdom of Cathay protected from plundering troupes of marauding Mongols by a barrier it was said could be seen from outer space.

Walled in certainly but only because this wall protects us from the possibility of any future landslide which might have seen our sweet little habitation slide down into the tartarean depths of the Camaiore valley. The wall, constructed in barely three weekends, is now practically finished.. It was erected with the assistance of our valiant comrades from Kosovo.

And it replaces sections of two previous walls which had collapsed in unknown times.

Built of giant breeze blocks, each one weighing a good thirty kilos, the wall was selected from possible options we had considered. First was a timber palisade but this was rejected on the grounds that timber does rot relatively quickly and that part of our land is quite dark and damp. Second possibility was a set of ‘gabbioni’ or stone piles kept together by wire cages. But this too we rejected on the grounds that in the present site they would prove unstable and difficult to position. Third was the dry stone wall. We had participated building one in Shetland to prevent sheep from plunging to their depth from a cliff-top when we volunteered for a Scottish conservation party. These walls can be very attractive and, in the right hands, very durable. Indeed part of our older walls are made in this manner. However, they require a lot of very decent stones and, what is more, excellent artistry. We also felt the pressure of the mountain descending upon them could easily have dislodged the stones as we had seen in several fallen examples in our area.

So we stuck to the breeze blocks, not the paragon of elegance, but made a little more attractive by being rendered with ‘schizzi’ of cement upon them.

I surveyed the wall today and decided it was a job well done. We feel safer for it. Not safer, that is, from immured nuns or prisoners in iron masks or pillaging Mongol hoards but safer because we know that we can live in our cottage in the woods for quite a few more years without moving – moving that is to another terrace further down our mountain slope.

What is an added bonus to the new walls is that they have produced some extra space which we can use for a well-drained and sun-lit vegetable patch. The tomatoes are growing particularly nicely.