Pacific Northwest Gardening: Laurie's Garden Tour, 1 by Laurie1

Laurie1 wrote:
This is our lane. I know it is hard to get a feel for proportions, but trust me, its narrow - if another car is coming, you need to be willing to back up or hope they will. At this point in the lane the road is actually about 1.8mtrs/6' below the surface of our fields (on the right) (even further below on the left). They weren't made this way, but over the early years as the carts and horses, and feet, rutted the road the surface dropped. With the steep incline, alot of the soil would have been washed away, and the relevelling would have taken more away. You need to keep in mind that these roads have been travelled possibly as much as a millenia - the main road at the top of our lane is an old roman road, and there are the ruins of a couple of old iron forges in the neighbourhood that date from that period. although we are on clay, we have a very high iron ore content - our stream which is spring fed actually runs red when it is in full spate.

At this point, too, it is interesting that the land runs downhill in two directions - across from left to right, and in the direction of this road. We are on a steep, tricky gradient.

This message was edited Jan 3, 2009 9:01 PM