After a slow start to the year, what with plague and other sundry delays, work has restarted on the Roman gatehouse! Brother Alf has cast the blocks for the archway pillars, added a scattering of fossils in the surface and hand-finished the surfaces to give them that worked stone look. Chris the stonemason has been at work building the pillars and adding to the walls.
Standing in the proto-tunnel, you can finally start to get a sense of the space.
The mitred blocks for the semi-circular arches – voussoirs, if you want to be all technical – are being cast by an external company because they are Too Hard For Us! We have done our ‘O’ level trigonometry, repeatedly, jointly and severally, and we’re pretty sure we’ve provided them with the right dimensions, and they’ve understood them. But only when the 48 blocks are delivered will we find out if they fit together to make the right size of arch! Nervewracking!