Life's a beach!

How sad am I? - I have so been looking for a way to use that title!
Anyway, on with the saga of the pond and the beach:

Himself, having studied the land behind the pond in a worried fashion for several days, decided that if we didn't do anything all the soil from the fruit cage was going to leap forward about a yard and end up in the pond! So he decreed that we needed a BIG retaining stone to prevent this from happening. In my usual fashion I moaned and groaned and said that the soil wouldn't go anywhere (mainly because I wanted to play at making the beach at this point, rather than shift more big rocks!). Himself quite rightly ignored me and started to clear back the soil near the pond and flatten the base to take a retaining wall of a rock.

Himself moving the topsoil in preparation for the rock.

Having realised that resistance was futile, I then opted to help. Having cleared the area and identified an appropriate (for that read very big and heavy) rock, we loaded it onto the flintstones trolley on the yard and hauled it up the garden- jolly hard work for just two of us!

As there was a steepish slope down to where we wanted it and we were using a scaffold tower with feet all at the same level, we had to securely prop up the pond-side legs. We did this by building two little mortar-free towers out of spare bricks topped off with a couple of bits of paving slab we had hanging around.

As we weren't sure how well this technique would work or how we'd position the rock, we protected the liners by folding them over another beam which straddled the pond.

Himself moving a wacking great beam of wood onto the now secure scaffold tower. The beam will support the chain hoist to lift the rock up - which is waiting patiently on the trolley!

The next step was to build a track for the trolley to trundle on. It definately trundled rather than rolled - mainly becasue the wheels were tree trunk shaped rather than round! The trolley was then shoved carefully along the track until it was under the chain hoist.

You can see in this photo how far back the butyl liner goes under the pebbles. Once all the stones are in place on the shelf the water level will be raised again, so the liner has to be high enough to prevent seepage. We used the same method of the plastic coated corrugated sheeting to provide stable edging - and the butyl went up and over the top of the sheeting and is held in place by backfilled soil.

Trolley and rock in place under the chain hoist.

Then the trolley had to be removed!

Oh, we got SO good with levers when shifting these rocks that we could have positioned them on a sixpence!

He's not levering on his own - he's just adjusting the position of the trolley!

Himself levered the rock up, I slid the strops underneath, he lowered the rock back down, then we fastened the strop to the chain hoist, hauled the rock up and removed the trolley.
Strops in place, rock ready to be raised.

THis is the rock securely held up by the chain hoist whilst Himself moves the trolley and the track.

The rock was then lowered down onto the pond ledge which had had a layer of sand put on it first. The rock was swiveled around until the best position was found and lowered gently into place.

The position was marked and the rock was hoisted up again to allow the fleece liner and the butyl top liner to be laid underneath it - I have to confess that my heart was in my mouth as I put the liners in place with half a tonne of rock above my hands! The photo above shows Himself smoothing sand marked by the rock as we swiveled it into place.

Once the main retaining rock was in place we could position the smaller stones - I tried quite a few (okay - lots!) before finding the correct combination of shapes and sizes that looked right together as well as appearing natural in their positionings. Himself sorted out and tidied up the excess liner ,which will not be visible once the tea house is completed.

The big rock (on the right of the photo) looks far less impressive here because I'd backfilled the area with the topsoil we'd removed earlier. All the stones had fleece liner offcuts underneath to prevent damage to the butyl.

This is looking down on the mostly completed beach from the path. The triangular gap between the three stones is a planting gap.

The completed beach with some planting in place.

Not a bad afternoon's work really!