Wine Bottle Grotto  Add/Read Comments

A chap down Herefordshire way has built a garden folly out of 5,000 wine bottles.

Richard Pim, 66 (as they always put in the newspapers), has spent the last three years creating the structure at the bottom of his garden out of empty wine bottles. So far he has used 3,000 of them to form a dome-shaped hut which he plans to use as a fernery. It stands 11ft high and is 19ft wide. Individual wine bottles have then been placed through a thick wall of mortar with their bottoms facing outwards.

This guy has already completed two of the four quadrants but needs a further 2,000 bottles to fill the remaining sections.

"I have spent a lot of time working alongside engineers and building things has always been a hobby of mine. I had a space in my garden that I needed to fill and I started thinking about building a dome-shaped folly. Then one day I was sitting in the garden drinking a glass of wine and as I held the bottle up to the sun, it made an amazing sparkly effect. I though 'That's it, I will make it out of wine bottles'. The structure is held together by four arches which are made out of reinforced concrete.
[Image from the Times]