Today we finally began to fill in the walls of the roundhouse with strawbale, and suddenly the building has a feeling of solidity. The fairly tight curve of the wall isn’t so easy to follow with bales, but it’s coming along nicely. Here are some of...
This week we went on a short adventure to Edinburgh to see my sister, and couldn’t resist seeing the castle, where I pondered what this magnificent creature might be. It looks just like a horse, sitting outside the national Scottish War Memorial, but has cloven...
Today we reached a milestone with the roundhouse as we put on the straw, then the pond liner, and finally began to cover the whole lot with earth. One more days work and we should have it all covered up. Today’s crew was – Susan, Simon, Brian, Bert, Brian,...
Some great weather today, and we managed to finish off the cordwood wall and the roof boarding. Helen and Jan did a great job of the cob and cordwood, and Wesley braved the roof, so we are all set for the final roof covering this week, and then the walls. The wine...
Our first attempts at a slate wall, using a cob mix as mortar, have turned out rather well. This will act as a damp proof course for the strawbale wall above. Evie has laid out the lower course for the next section – below – and with any luck we’ll...
Another extraordinarily wet volunteer day on Monday, but undaunted, the team made a start on the cob and cordwood wall at the front of the roundhouse. In the morning we learned how to cut wine bottles in half, using a glass cutter and hot and cold water, and then...
For a day off, it has been a very industrious one. In the morning I cut another load of cordwood ready for Monday’s volunteer group to continue building the front wall of the roundhouse.A potato harvest has been long overdue, so we raided our plot and came back...
After six days work, the roundhouse is really starting to take shape. Three quarters of the roof has been boarded out, and will be the visible ceiling from inside. The outside will be covered with old sheet or tarp, then strawbale, then pond liner, then more old...
Well I never thought we’d do this as quickly, but today the roof frame went on with surprisingly little fuss. In the morning we completed the henges and finished the wallplate – below and had a practice run with the reciprocal frame at ground level so...
Day three on our roundhouse build, and we have made excellent progress. Today we prepared the supporting posts by charring the ends of them in a fire, before dropping them into the post holes dug on Monday. Clinton, Chris and I backfilled the holes with slate,...
After my last post on Cloughjordan – the eco-village that isn’t, I couldn’t help wondering that surely I couldn’t be alone in thinking that it was a soulless place that really had missed the point. Turns out I was right. There is even a website...
When we began the process of looking at how and where we’d like to live, we started as close to home as we could, and that turned out to be ‘The Village’ at Cloughjordan. Hooray, we thought, a cutting edge eco-village at least if not exactly on our...
