Rebuilding the West Lawn Bottoms

Excavating the West Lawn Bottoms is part of the solution, but we also need to put it back together.  If the Bottoms grass area is going to be (mostly) level, the stone work along the fence needs to be mostly level too.  It is currently far from level, it slopes down with the fence and the original slope of the land.

And making the side stone work level will require another course of stone work along the border between the Bottoms and the Blue Rock Pool.  Two trips to Whittlesey Landscape Supplies gets 720 pounds of rock ($62.35).

which we can mortar into place.

We will probably need to continue the stone work, but for now we have a start on that, let's look at the larger picture of what we have excavated.

We have a lot of large stone pieces, and we want a stone retaining wall along the left of the above picture, to hold the dirt back around the base of the Oak tree.  So we will stack the rocks that we have, to form a stone retaining wall.  After a day of trial and error, we have a start.

Now we need to dig out more rock, to continue the wall, and dirt, to fill in the pit in front of the wall.

Continuing on this digging, we move all the dirt over out of the way, and continue to dig away.  That exposes a large rock in the lower left corner of the photo below.

Further work exposes the entire piece.

It's much too large to work with, so we break it down into four pieces.

And we can use those rocks to extend the retaining wall.