We tried, again, to remove the tar

The tar went on in 1908 and has been reapplied at least twice since, most recently in the sixties by a man who evidently believed in it. It is about eleven millimetres thick in places.

A conservation officer looked at it in the spring, put her thumbnail into it, and said the sentence we have now had framed: “I would leave that alone.” So we have.

It smells, faintly, on the two or three genuinely hot days a year. Guests in the Gable have never once complained about it and twice asked what it was.