Up the garden path

This is the path I take to get to my garden, and it's where I'm going to try taking a series of pictures to explore the ways the gates to the gardens here protect what lies beyond. I know there's a 'One Street' strand on Blip,and perhaps there should be a 'One Path' one too! The first picture in this series is here.

Here the backs of the houses are on the right, the garden wall on the left, covered in some places by thickly bushing ivy. The path is narrow and hence nearly always shaded. The Acacia you can see here still grows, though much of its bark is missing - they're tough trees.

Along the foot of the wall you can see the gulley which used to carry water from the village spring at the top of a hill about a kilometre away: there's a pipe through the wall at each garden to take water from this to a sunken water reservoir. The bridges across the gulley are mostly single large slabs of stone.

Each proprietor had a certain time on a certain day when he or she could dam the gulley and take the water. It was a great - and free - system, but it's not functioning now. I've heard that people upstream took water when they shouldn't and there were disputes, and also people don't want to get up at some unearthly hour in the morning to dam a stream. So I imagine each garden has a piped supply and a tap, as I do, though we have to pay for this.

The fronts of the houses here face the main road through the village: there's quite a contrast between the traffic out front and the quiet out back.