Hearth

Snowing heavily here - 3" in about as many hours.

Decided therefore to rebuild the hearth which has been on my list of things to do when the weather is poor. As you can see it looks like a (bad) rockery and has an ugly metal pipe sticking out of the middle of it (an old air intake from when the fire was an open one).

This morning I planed up some old chestnut and built a facetted timber kerb and I've just started breaking out the old concrete and rocks. The left hand side disintegrated with a few hammer blows but the right hand side seemed more solid. In fact very solid - in fact its bedrock! Not only that it's microgranite, so there are no bedding planes or lines of weakness at all. Hmmm - dynamite anyone?