First Day of Major Building - July 26th '10

Finally the time has arrived to start on the structure! By the end of the day, tangible evidence of our house and our Iron Age Dream was beginning to take form.

Earlier in the weeks we had engaged in a particular debate - To use or not to use treated fence posts?

Fierce Iron Age Beast amongst the building materials.

Now, we are all aware that in the Iron Age they didn't have treated fence posts. No ones trying to pull the wool over anyone’s eyes here. On the flip side we also know Round Houses in Britain to be constructed with Oak for the main posts. Being in Canada offers its own challenges in the forms of what wood is available to us. As we do not have Oak trees in Alberta, and we want our house to last as long as possible, we came to a consensus on treated posts being our best bet. We sucked up our 'But they didn't use those...' attitudes and continued on with the project!

Holes were drilled into the tops of all 18 posts, using Victorian hand drills. (What? Those aren't period correct either? We banished all truly modern things from the building site at least!) The pointed ends of the fence posts were sowed off, whilst I was busy digging the holes for all 18 posts. The posts were then dropped into the holes for us to measure the height of (using the height of a spear as our guide - which ended up being too tall, but more on that blunder later!) Next it was time to pack the dirt and clay back into the holes, around the posts, to keep them level and strong.

Our post-packing-skills took some time to develop as the first 2-3 posts were wobbly and needed redoing, but we quickly the art of banging the clay down with a heavy metal rod. The posts are now securely in the ground, unshakable and level, ready for the wall-plates! ..... or are they??

Ring of posts before they were straightened and packed.