I’m still working on the garden wall and hope to get it finished this year. I took a week off work when the weather was suitably dreary and managed 3 courses on the 17m stretch. I’m averaging around 65 bricks a day. The bricks themselves go down fairly quickly – it’s the pointing, cleaning and setting out bricks, and cutting bricks for the piers that seems to take the time.

This weekend I built up the corner and I’m working on the 3m stretch at the back. I like the back. I can go up 4 courses over a weekend.

I’ve balanced some bricks and coping on top of the corner to figure out the height I’m aiming for. I’m aiming 2 bricks higher than the wall I took down but a brick short of the original wall height. I think I will have enough bricks but it is going to be really close.

I counted the remaining bricks and was short by 2 or 3 courses even if I clean off the stack of uncleaned bricks with very hard lime mortar that is very difficult to remove.

A road trip north of Birmingham to Cawarden yielded some more bricks to mix in. They are Bedford Clamps and match very well. I also bought the most expensive brick in the world – a reproduction half round corner for the coping.

I’ve been experimenting with Bebbingtons weathering tint on the corner. It started off bright orange but now it’s a deep red and matches the coping. That’s quite cool.

Towards the end of September the wall is 5 courses higher. I had another week off and had some help for a couple of days. We managed 2 courses in 2 days. There are only 4 courses to go before the coping.

I’ve built the corner up to full height and balanced the corner coping on top to get a feel for it. It’ll be the same height as the existing part of the wall that still forms part of the gable end of the barn. A brick higher than planned so I’m going to run out of bricks again.