Renovating the swimming pool

La Polyphonie C'est Sexy dans le pressoir

As part of the plan of breathing new life into the buildings at La Côte, we organised a little concert last Saturday in the barn, otherwise known as the Pressoir because of the wine press which dominates the room there.  The wine press was transformed for the evening into a temporary stage and the group "La Polyphonie C'est Sexy" sang some wonderful unaccompanied traditional French and Quebeccois songs in beautiful polyphonic arrangements.  They really are a fantastic and accomplished group and we were so lucky to be able to host them for our first try at hosting an event of this type at La Côte (certainly not the last) - the Pressoir isn't huge but we still managed to welcome an audience of over forty people with a bit of room to spare!  Watch this space in the future....

Gravel in the courtyard

New layer of gravel for the turning circle

It doesn't look like much, but yesterday I put down about 450 kgs of gravel in the courtyard, that's six trailer loads from our local quarry in Dangé St Romain.  This is in order to have a slightly drier experience of driving to and walking around the house, with all of the rain that we've had recently and in the knowledge that we have several natural springs running down the hillside towards the house and down into the river valley of the Vienne.  In due course we are going to install a 'French' drain around the house to help as well (apparently nothing to do with France, but designed by a Mr French!).  And yes, we need to buy a bigger trailer!  Still it already makes a difference, even if my arms are hurting a bit today from all that shovelling.  Wow, two blog posts in one day - I'd better have a rest now ;-)

Scrub bashing near Ropion

Clearing scrub and small trees on the slope by Ropion

 Well I'm afraid that the blog has been very quiet recently, but that doesn't mean that we've not been working hard!  Recently we have taken advantage of some drier weather to start clearing some of the scrub and small trees, particularly the dreaded acacia trees - perhaps the most unpleasantly spiky tree known to man, whose thorns seem to cut through even chainsaw gloves!  As you can see we now have some bonfire piles drying out ready for a drier weather and we have also been starting to clear more wood from various fallen trees and branches on the slope, ready to make into another wood pile in due course.

Stones and pallettes - des pierres et des pallettes

 Now that we have finally secured additional pallettes for the area behind the little house we know as Ropion, we can finally get down to the serious business of starting to proper store and sort all of the building stone that currently exists around La Cote.  Some of the stone is from collapsed garden walls and more is from the other half of the Ropion house which collapsed several decades ago, but may date back to as early as the Fifteenth century with possible links to the Abbey of Saint Denis in the village of Vaux-sur-Vienne.

The stone varies from very soft tufau (limestone) which would originally have been quarried out the two caves which stretch back into the hillside nearby, to very hard lumps of flint (silex) good for making strong foundations or lower levels of walls/buildings.

 Although you can see that we have made a good start on moving and sorting the stone, there is still a huge pile from the collapsed other half of the old house (Ropion) on the left here.  This is already far clearer than I have ever seen it and masses of ivy and other vegetation has already been removed.  Interestingly from an archaeological/architectural perspective, evidence was also found of a former iron gutter and downpipe behind Ropion which suggests that at some point in its life it did indeed have a system for managing rainwater.

As you can see from the picture on the right, we have recovered large amounts of broken roof tiles which appear to have been deliberately buried in the ground behind the building.  We have kept these as useful building material as interspersed between the softer limestone blocks the can help the walls to breathe and let moisture escape.

bruce.howard's photostream

bruce.howard's photostream on Flickr.

Rebuilding the goat shed over a few of the hottest day's this summer has seen in France - hopefully it won't fall down now!

Garden archaeology or a series of small walls...

 Again we seem to have been too busy doing things at La Cote and elsewhere to keep up to date with recording progress on various mini-projects on this blog.  Anne has recently finished her 375km bike ride with our friend Ruth, from Ouistreham ferry terminal in Normandy to the house here at La Cote.  We were very lucky with the weather, and I was even luckier as I was driving the support van and arranging the logistics (camp sites etc) en route.

Now we've got that out of the way, we can get down to other things back home...

You can see from the pictures here, the wall to the right of the well which we are trying dig out, get a vertical face and then work out how best to rebuild it.  I am looking on this as a training project, hopefully building on the experience gained from working on rebuilding the walls of the ancien lavoir in the village of Ferriere-Larcon.  First we need to grade the stones into piles and let it dry out, then plan to start rebuilding it with suitable lime mortar.  Some of the collapsed stones are very substantial, as I discovered yesterday when moving them with help from our friend Mark.