May and I bought our house in Stirling in 1976. It was built in 1830 and the original garden was on three rather awkward levels. The person we bought it from had found it hard to sell the property and had hit on a wonderful idea.
He bulldozed the old wash-house into the garden and levelled it with slag from nearby coal fired power stations. The idea was to make the house into an office and create a car park out of the garden.
It was not a pretty sight. We worked on it for years desperately trying to remove at least some of the hundreds of tons of slag. It proved impossible to finish the job as the wash-house stones were very large and very heavy and extremely difficult to budge.
Despite all this May eventually turned it into a reasonably attractive place. It was an organic process. The garden today is nothing like the one she started off with and will hopefully be quite different to the one in years to come.