Monday 19th April – and the digging on site began. Not for the house itself, but to do the first part of the electricity connection work.
We were lucky to have been introduced to Eenie MacGillvray a few months ago, who agreed to help us dig the trenches for the electricity cables. But this – of course – wasn’t a straightforward little trench from a pole not too far away. The plot location according to our planning application was ’80 metres north of [our neighbours] Brightwater Lodge’. The pole we needed to connect to was on the Brightwater Lodge driveway, and the 80 metres was as the crow flies, and didn’t take account of the line we needed to first dig under their grass, beneath their drive, through a chunk of rock, into a trench on the adjacent landowner’s piece of land, and then finally taking a left turn up the side of our plot.
We also decided fairly early on that we would really like to move the electricity pole that would otherwise be central to the view from our house, and bury the mains cable between the two adjacent poles. Whilst we thought costs may be totally prohibitive (especially as this pole happens to carry the mains cable for the whole of the Ardnamurchan peninsula), there was never any way of doing our electricity connection very cheaply and in fact the difference burying the cable made to the cost – in the grand scheme of things – wasn’t actually too bad. And for the difference it makes to our view, it’s worth every penny!
Six days of expert digging, cable laying, broadband duct installing, back filling and ‘digger landscaping’ later, our electricity connection was live and the mains cable laid in the ground to be connected up to two new poles in phase 2 of the project hopefully later this Summer.
Things I learnt that week in Ardnamurchan:
- Eenie is an absolute master digger driver
- mains electricity cable is incredibly heavy
- there really is a huge amount of destruction needed to dig trenches of this type
- ‘huge destruction’ can then be transformed back to fairly astounding ‘neatness’ by someone who knows what they’re doing (see during and after photos of the driveway below as an example)
- I really loved being a (very unskilled) labourer – I now feel pretty well qualified at electricity sand and tape laying, and installing broadband ducting!
As first weeks of self-build projects go, this was as good as it gets. I was very aware how very different a week it would have been if it had been pouring with rain – trench digging and cable laying in mud would have been an entirely different job. Let’s hope the build gods stay on side!
trench dug across driveway for cable 
and then driveway restored 
the great broadband duct line! 
destruction 
and restoration (with Eenie ‘digger landscaping’)