The most most rainfall, which drenched and then drenched again an already sodden earth, cut a maze of trenches and watercourses throughout the garden. The grassed area of the driveway was left looking like a miniature of the Western front in the Great War, with two muddy trenches facing each other.

I decided to fill each small ravine with a line of bricks, then stones and finally earth. So I began digging further down and discovered that someone, quite a long time ago, had sunk a lower line of bricks in the very spot where I was lining mine up. 

I felt a little like an archaeologist might have, as he or she gently excavated a site in the hope of finding signs of an earlier civilisation in the layers below. Mine is a lot more recent - certainly within the past 60 years, but pleasing, nevertheless.