I live on a hill Becky, so the neighbours' kitchen wall sits higher than ours (as I said their kitchen on ground level sits next to our first floor) and it marks the property boundary.
But these houses were built with 'ancient' methods aka dumping all kinds of rubble in the ground as a prehistoric foundation and now with our renovations and digging away dirt this has become visible on our side as you can see.
This also meant that the clay soil that provided some stability is gone and now we're replacing it with a stronger new wall. This acts as a retaining wall for the visible clay and rubble so it doesn't wash away (and could crack their wall), but also for aesthetics:
This is not particulary nice to look at :p And there's no way we can hack at it to get an even surface for plastering or whatever, so this is the solution :p Also, it provides some texture to the wall which could benefit us. For example if we painted the hind most wall dark grey or black and the one(s) up front slightly lighter it gives a sense of a deeper border and 'into the shadows' (well i tink)
Red line shows more or less how the new wall is going to be; staircase like :p
