Annual Hols...

Tonight Peter and I fly out for a much needed holiday. I can say farewell to all my work responsibilities for 2 weeks and we can just kick back and catch up with sleep, good food and wine and some quality time together. So, no blog posts for the next fortnight, but we look forward to sharing the building progress with you all again in September, when we will be 12 weeks away from finishing WBP (hopefully).

The Arrival Of The Peafowl...

Our Peafowl have just arrived and they are stunning. We have 1 peahen and 2 peacocks. They are only 12 weeks old, which is a good age to get them because they are large enough not to be vulnerable to small animals and larger birds, but young enough to tame / train.

They will now stay in their enclosure for several weeks until they have developed a homing sense to the park, and then we can start to let them free range a little.

We will need to build them a proper roost once they start to free range, to encourage them to stay where we want them too over night instead of in our neighbours' trees or our roof!

Cupolas, Clock Towers and Turrets...

The Carriage House roof is now complete, or at least the slate is on, but it won't be properly finished until the cupola is craned on. The cupola or probably more correctly turret from the latin turris for tower, resembles the one above, and will sit over the gap in the middle of the roofline...

 Above and Below: The Carriage House (back and front respectively) with the slate tiles on the roof. Note the gap in the centre of the roofline for the cupola.

The manor was originally going to have a cupola on top, but the chimneys already breached the 10m high 'building envelope' and required us to get a special dispensation. I can not imagine we would have been able to build the cupola (I love NZ dearly, but it does suffer from tall poppy syndrome and many froward people will opposed anything which is different). The cupola for the manor was based on that of Belton House...

However, the small cupola on the Carriage House with its weather vane and clock faces is well within the envelope and has been signed off without any concerns. Originally a cupola on a barn, stable block or carriage house had a practical purpose - the louvres allowed ventilation in what were usually fairly musty buildings full of hay, silage and live animals. Beyond their practical use, they developed more ornate designs, usually incorporating a weather vane and a clock face on one if not all sides, and sometimes a bell...

Weather vanes 

The term weather vane derives from the old English word fana, meaning flag. Weather vanes date back to the ancient Romans and Greeks, a notable example being the weather vane atop the temple of the eight winds in Rome, which comprised the God Neptune with his triton pointing in the direction of the wind flow...

Today weather vanes often take many whimsical forms. Here are some particularly lovely ones...

Above: A traditional trotting horse weather vane

Below: A not so traditional flying pig (I would like to get a flying pig weather vane for the barn).

We are pricing up various electric clocks at the moment. I really like this one with a black face and gold numerals, matching the black and gold theme of WBP, from Outdoor Clocks UK...

with maybe an Oxford blue one for the chapel bell tower...

Here are some more of their clocks and turrets...