At the entrance to the land, we do have another neighbour.
Unfortunately, I’m not sure of his name yet. He is around 75 I think (or if he is younger, he has had a hard life) and he works like an ox.
While I pottered up and down and moved the odd post, he cleared and then hand ploughed a huge area of land and planted it with a large array of vegetables. Watching his incredible energy and achievement I decided that I should save the many self-seeded umbrella tree saplings by transplanting them to new locations. I don’t know if this is the case for all umbrella trees or just ones growing in sand but after digging for some time, I realised that their roots go straight down and down for a long way. This added to the fact that for every shovel of sand you dig out two fall back in, means that it is a long and rather tricky task. Eventually it came out and I drove it to its new home. As I stood back to admire my little bit of true work- even though it doesn’t compare in the slightest to my 75 year old neighbours herculean achievement – I realise that I am in agony and that single 1 meter high sapling is going to be my single achievement that day as my back has gone. I really hope it survives.
STOP! With a buoyancy of atomism, we emailed Teresa to ask if it was worth submitting planning permission as our PIP was an almost certainty. The sombre reply arrives in my inbox. The Camara has put a holt on all PIP’s requesting hospitality. We didn’t see that coming. You see the Camara has a quoter of hospitality beds it is allowed to permit within the area and it would appear that they got rather over excited and forgot to count how many they were granting permission for. So, we are at a complete holt and possibly for a very long time.
Refusing to admit defeat I go back to the 50 meter rule which is the one thing stopping us building a house. I was always convinced that our land was no wider than 100m which ruled this option out but faced with the real possibility that we were again the owners of very expensive trees, I had another look. Probably due to the thought of paying for a 776 meter (0.5 mile) long drive, I had never looked at the absolute end of the land as a location for our house and now I could kick myself as there it was, a very odd shaped section of land, 1435 sq/m of it that was outside of the 50 meter rule. I email Teresa and Silvia with my find and we are back in the game again.