A temporary mezzanine

Now the blockwork of the Roman gatehouse is complete, Al is working on the roof – and also finishing the upper sections of the blockwork, which will be hard to work on when the roof is on. Jobs include rendering the blocks to make them prettier and adding concrete to stop pigeons (which will inevitable get in) from roosting at the top of walls. To make life easy, and for safety when working at height, Al has built an extremely natty mezzanine floor out of pallets and some timbers rescued from an old pergola. This gives us a fabulous temporary view from the “battlements”!

Experimental! Here is a panorama picture, which was very easy to take with my shiny Google Pixel 4a camera but it has proven surprisingly difficult to find a satisfactory panorama plugin for WordPress. The panorama below uses Panorama Viewer which seems to be the best available. It doesn’t work in the post preview as seen on the main Rumwoldstow page; you have to visit the post URL. And it starts a little zoomed out, giving ugly black arcs above or below the image; seems to be caused by the addition of up / down scrolling which can’t be turned off. If you zoom in a touch with mouse scroll or the nice visible buttons, it’s not too bad. But really, it’s 2022, how is there not a working plugin to view a panorama taken on a Google camera?

To finish up, here are some photos of the orchard where pear trees are in flower, and a bonus of Tinky the very cheeky local cat who knows he owns this end of the village.

Despite giving us some very tasty little apples last year, the Hambledon Deux Ans doesn’t look like flowerinig this year, although it appears healthy
The Louis Bonne of Jersey pear seems to be trying to make up for it
As does the Uvedale St Germain pear!
Tinky is a cheeky wee beggar
Al hard at work applying timber preservative to the wall plate