( or Drystone Walling and the Dolomites )
Grappa Frisbee, Deportment, and the Eighty Year Old Shepherd
Day Six. 26 June 2006
Monday. Up early on a Monday morning to be ready for the night’s adventure, we pack a variety of packs and sleeping apparatus along with our normal work clothes. At the restaurant at the bottom of the hill we park up the ‘rust bucket’ vn and move all our gear – loosely packed so that it seems to take up more space than our original arrival – to a variety of cars and Desirée’s father’s plush silver off-roader. Whilst some walk, some of us take the more relaxed vehicular route up the mountain.
By the time we have arrived on site, the eighty year old former shepherd Ernesto and his friends Gianni (The Tractor) and Benito (The Chainsaw) have already cut back the grass and nettles and started work on reconstructing the walls. We begin work immediately, working with bars and mattocks and our bare hands to get out the from the ground, the rocks that have fallen, over the years, from the walls of the sheep fold…
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