The day before we planned to fire the furnace for the first time we had a 40 minute downpour at Quarley which resulted in the shelter flooding very quickly, with several inches of water building up over most of the floor. The firepit was completely full.

The water soaked away fairly quickly, and was mainly gone by the next day, but we had to use pallets to walk on whilst the floor dried out. The firepit had to be baled out and silt cleaned off the tiles. Damage to the furnace and lehr was minimal, but the water had produced a tide mark on the walls about two inches above the floor. Below this mark the water had soaked into the outer walls and partially eroded some of the unfired daub. We left this undisturbed as it did not affect the strength of the walls.

Before the third firing we closed the gaps under the wooden panels (where all of the rainwater had swept in as run-off from the sloping field behind the shelter).

We used one foot-wide strips of butyl rubber sheet stapled to the lowest plank and buried several inches under the soil in front of the plank. This worked extremely well, and the only weak area was the gate, although we had added a butyl rubber skirt to it.

This was eventually solved using sandbags made with the help of Steve, Fiona and Tracey, but only after the fourth firing, during which we had another, smaller flood.