Today saw the first major landmark in this project, with the whole for the main pool basin being dug. The hole is approximately 10m long, 5.5m wide, and 1.7m deep.
It proved to be a little harder work that first expected and needed a much smaller bucket to get through the rock. We’ve always know that there is a lot of bedrock right under the surface, with out house cellar and footings being a great example; whereby the cellars are carved out of the rock and the house sits directly on it.
However, we didn’t quite expect it to be quite this much and dense; with it literally all being schist from about 5-10cm under the surface. For those who are not geologist, schist is a metamorphic rock that started off as sedimentary deposits. In many ways it is like slate and you can see clear layers in the side of the whole, which have been turned vertically from seismic activity (I presume plate tectonics). Apparently schist is reasonably crumbly when wet (i.e. in the ground) but when dried out it becomes as hard as concrete. A lot of the local buildings, especially barns, are built using it in the local area.
Anyway, the overall conclusion is that the pool is not going to go anywhere and that the bedrock will mean that we have an incredibly sound base for the pool to be built upon. No need to worry about the elasticity of clay soil here…