After yet another night of heavy rain, Nick’s first task this morning was to start pumping the water out of the moat (aka future terrace) again. But the sun was shining, so Joel decided it would be a good day to dig out the foundations; Kieran drove our mini-digger (he’s still hankering after a chance to drive Joel’s monster digger), while Seb shovelled the edges by hand and Nick barrowed away the sodden, heavy, slimy, sticky goo which, after 3 weeks of near constant rain, currently passes for soil. Being further hampered by the fact that  a good proportion stayed stuck to the digger bucket when Kieran tipped it into the barrow and to the barrow when Nick tipped it onto the heap made progress painfully slow, but progress they did. This, in spite of the occasional torrential downpours, in spite of the mud having quicksand-type properties (they completely lost three, 3foot long, foot square oak beams at one point), and in spite of the digger nearly tipping over as the mud oozed between and around the tracks. When it came time to get the digger out of the hole, Kieran had to push it out with its own bucket simultaneously with driving it up the planks; if they’d left it there, it seemed that it would have disappeared into the mire by morning!