… through the wall between the house and the lean-to.

It’s not properly through, yet and to be honest I don’t think that it will ever be, because one of the down-sides drilling from both sides of the wall is that the two holes never mate up and mine is about 5mm out.

This morning I was working on the website but for one reason or another I couldn’t concentrate. Add to that the fact that we had so much solar energy this morning, and so I decided to go out and run the huge drill for half an hour or so

That used up some of the surplus electrical energy while I was doing it (only 82 amps made it into the home-made 12-volt immersion heater that I use as a dump load for the surplus energy I capture) and it broke through.

I need to tidy the hole up now, which will take a while, run a tube through the hole, and pass 6 wires through the tube – 230 volt mains, 12 volt DC power and 12-volt DC light, and then the world will be my lobster in the lean-to.

One of the benefits of having power in the lean-to is that I can tile the floor, make a kind-of work area and then install the big washing machine.

I’d love to see how that works and how much current that it uses, bearing in mind that I’ll be running it off the hot-fill from the dump-load with the machine on a low temperature setting and on the economy wash low-water programme. 

Talking of the lean-to, I spend a few hours on the wall too and it seems that I’m advancing rapidly.

While I was scavenging around for stones in the house, I came across a pile of smashed-up lightweight brick, plaster and the like from when I knocked a wall down and so I’m shovelling that up and using it as infill.

Apart from the fact that it is of course quite light, it’s slowly emptying the house and that can only be a good thing, killing two birds with one stone.

For our Wednesday walk this afternoon, we went to Roche d’Agoux, a small village right out in the wilderness on the edge of the world.

Roche d’Agoux has a couple of claims to fame, not the least of which is this really impressive outcrop of milky quartzite. There’s a whole seam of this stuff that runs diagonally through the whole of the north-west of the Combrailles, making the odd spectacular appearance here and there, and spectacular is certainly the word.

The photo of the Roche is quite well-known – it’s a typical touristy thing of course – but what isn’t so well-known is the quartz. And so I’ll show you a close-up photo of that, and you can see what I mean by “milky quartz”.

Incidentally, it’s from this rocky outcrop where the Roche in the name comes from and it is, incidentally the same root for the word that is used for the area of the Staffordshire Moorlands in the UK the Roaches – that place where the wallabies hang out

When you look around here today at the sleepy little village of … errr … 91 people (a far cry from the heady days of the 1840s when 450 people were living here) it’s hard to remember that at one time, this was quite probably the most important town of the region.

You look at towns like Marcillat en Combraille, for example. A big, bustling village today yet it didn’t receive its charter for a market until 1258 – and that charter was granted by none other than a certain nobleman called Guillaume de la Roche d’Agoux.

He was certainly the most important nobleman in the area at the time and he did have his castle here in Roche d’Agoux.

Many people will tell you that the Roche d’Agoux is actually the ruins of his castle, or chateau-fort, but that isn’t so.

That was something that was mentioned in a guide book of the region of the 1880s and which has lingered on in current folklore.

In fact, that’s the site of his castle over there on that mound. However, it was dismantled in the early 15th Century and that date is interesting.

It’s quite early for this to have happened – long before Cardinal Richelieu’s edicts of the 1620s against the nobility that led to the dismantling of most of the castles in this area – and nothing has come to light which might suggest a reason for this.

However, certainly a few years ago there were some quite substantial remains to be seen, but no-one knows the present position today, because the current owner does not welcome visitors.

I spoke … "at great length" – ed … last time that we were here about the magnificent church.

Like every church almost everywhere in Medieval Europe, the rapid expansion of the population in that period led to the rapid expansion of the church, and having a crafty nose around, I came across some really good evidence of this.

Up there we can see the remains of a window that has long-since been filled it. It’s very reasonable to assume that this wall was thus an outside wall of the building and the light was lost when the annexe was built on behind it

So I dropped Marianne off at Pionsat and went back home to carry on working for a while.

No point in wasting the day.

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