Building a Testudarium – stage 2

Having already started building the outside section of a testudarium for Hermes I thought I’d focus on building the inside section today.

We’ve quite a few old bricks in the garden so I’ve decided to use these for the remaining walls of the testudarium. Obviously from a recycling perspective it’s great to reuse bricks and they also have a rustic appearance. The downside of using old bricks is that you need to spend lots of time chipping all the old mortar off them before you can use them. Despite this I laid three courses of bricks today and this represents the main part of the testudarium inside the greenhouse. It was a bit tricky to build the walls around the existing staging in the greenhouse and still give Hermes plenty of room.