It’s taken a while but finally instead of smashing, breaking, stripping and generally demolishing we’ve actually started to build something!! 
Having dug out the bank at the back of the garden we could now move onto building a retaining wall along the back. I decided to make these walls out of railway sleepers. I got a very good price from one of our local timber merchants (perhaps they couldn’t believe how many we needed!!). It’s also much easier for me to build with wood than bricks. Whatever I decided to use the job of hauling the materials up the sloping garden was going to be a pain in the a***, and so it proved.
Anyhow I carried enough sleepers up the garden to make a start. Having marked out I used some sleepers as giant fence posts, burying a 3rd of their length in the ground. This mean digging holes almost a meter deep in the ground. The first foot was easy digging through clay soil. Then came the more difficult ’shaley’ slate. This had to be broken up with a heavy duty digging spike before it could be lifted out. As if that wasn’t enough at the bottom of several holes were large granite field stones (you can see some of them on the right of the 2nd picture). These stones only revealed themselves after I had dug down most of the way – too late to shift the post to another location. More digging . .. . . .
Finally holes were dug and posts concreted into place. Postcrete is great for this – pour a couple of bags into the hole, add water on top and tamp down. Job done. . . .. . .well except for levelling, not easy with posts this size.
I did eventually get all the posts up and you can see I’ve started fixing other sleepers to the front with coach bolts. I’ve also got some metal straps in their for extra support, 300mm screws are also added at ’strategic’ points.
