Lifting the last truss into place

On Tuesday 25th August the last truss was lifted into place and work now starts on lifting the purlins and then getting the rafters up before cladding the building with insulation and a slate roof.

Capturing the moment

Paul Bye has very kindly offered to capture the creation of the studio on DVD - here he is on his platform capturing the lifting of the trusses.

The film that will be produced will be linking the construction back to John Ruskin's ideas of housing his museum along the lane at St George's Farm - it never happened then - but we have the drawings and his ideas to go on.

the 'Cathedral' taking shape

We've started to call it the Cathedral - although the official title is the Ruskin Studio!

Here you can see three of the four main trusses now in place and held there by a clever use of acro props by the builder aned artisan Ron Clowes

The Big Lift

Last week saw the main trusses being lifted into place with a big crane

Getting ready for the big lift

We are ready for the next stage in the Studio project with all the oak timbers now back on site and jointed ready to be lifted into place next week.

All the joints are marked with traditional chisel marks to make sure they are put together in the right order.

So soon a crane will be coming to lift them into place, then the purlins will be fitted, the rafters and then the whole lot clad in birch plywood, a layer of insulation and then the slate roof.

Pigs in the woods - Sunday 16th July 2009

Here are the 3 Gloucester Old Spot pigs being visited by the group from the Wolverhampton Tabernacle Baptist Church today.

The pigs are doing a great job clearing bracken and brambles from this part of the forest in our experiment.

The group also saw the lambs, chickens and Large Black pigs as well as seeing the trees they planted in the orchard nearly 3 years ago.

Dowsing to find our water pipes 12th july 2009

Life is never dull at Uncllys and on Wednesday we had a visit from 2 folks from the Far Forest WI who had been learning to dowse.

Here they are at the gate sensing that our water pipe is just where they are standing.

From there we went on to search out for other peipes in the forest which will save me having to dig a lot of trenches!

Foot trimming July 28th 2009

Here is Gemma giving the older cows a trim of their hooves. This needs to be done about once a year so doing it while they are all back at the farm makes sense.

Gemma did a great job and trimmed 8 cattle on the day.

Time for the annual TB test - 28 July 2009

Here's Mark with Jon Miles and Sophie getting all the cattle back to Uncllys for their annnual TB test.

The test is in 2 parts - on the Tuesday the vet comes and injects them all in the neck with 2 types of TB - avian and bovine - and then she comes back on Friday to see if they reacted - by forming a lump on their neck.

This year we were all clear.

New Large Black Pigs arrive

After the success of the last pair (very tasty!) we decided to get another couple of Large Black pigs. They are actually quite small at the moment having just been weaned but they will soon put on weight.

They have arrived just in time to start eating the early windfalls from our apple tree.