It's been quite a few months since this saga began, and we've been having to manage entering the site over the neighbours driveway. Not ideal, for us or them. This delay has been down to the dormice ... yes, I know.
When we first discovered our new home-to-be, we knew we'd have to share it with quite a bit of wildlife. Being on the edge of the Quantock Hills AONB, was part of the appeal, so we were quite ready to take on including the building a "Luxury Loft Apartment" for the various bat species, create "Tree Tops Glamping" for the owls etc.etc., but we hadn't quite realised that our beautiful hazel and honeysuckle hedgerow was favoured by those oh-so-cute dormice. So, the lovely Hannah (our ecologist) understandably got terribly excited at the prospect of dormice being potentially in residency. This however stopped any hope of us breaking through the hedge to create our new driveway for roughly a year. "A Year!" I hear you shout. Yes - you see we can't disturb the dormice while they nest, or hibernate, oh and did I say that we mustn't forget the bird's nesting season too? So that gives us about 5 minutes in September when we might have been able to interfere with the hedge. We missed that moment.
So, to cut a long story short, after ongoing surveys, lots of invoices and a hedge that's rather over grown this year, we finally found a way around the problem and now have a 'small' entrance that will need to be expanded sometime next year. We can get on site!! Hurrah!
This was our first really exciting day!
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