Well, it has been a long time since the last post but things are finally starting to happen. We received the conservation report a while ago and have a copy at the Lawrence Information Centre on Ross Place for anyone interested in reading the detailed history. It was put together by Guy Williams and is wonderfully detailed. Guy is currently working on the specifications and once we have those we can finally get started.
In the meantime we have cleared a bit of the long grass with the help of a digger, thank you Eddie!
We have also made a start on clearing the ivy but there is more to go. For this and the bramble I think we are finally going to have to succumb to using some poison. The ivy is so entwined through the rock wall there is no chance we can remove it all.
And Hiske is here helping out with a number of things and one of them is sieving the 130 year old pile of dust under the floor. She is finding a lot of wrappers, dance tickets, wallpaper and cigarette packets and a few days ago arrived home with a stamp dated 1840! That got us excited but it turned out to be a commemorative stamp from 1940 and worth about 50 cents. So that won't fund the restoration. I found out today from my father's friend Gordon that they did a lot of commemorative stamps in 1940.
Hiske has carried on sieving and her latest find is a wonderful collection of old film posters! it makes me even more determined to show films in the hall once we have it restored. We don't know the date of these but according to Gordon they are probably pre WWII. There is a Rin Tin Tin one, Ramona, and my favourite 7th Heaven says "does this girl deserve to be whipped? NO a thousand times NO!
