Pentland Way plinth

The Pentland Way is a new walking route, running from Swanston, just south of Edinburgh, to Dunsyre in South Lanarkshire. To mark the start of it and to help publicise the route, the Friends of the Pentlands decided to erect a plinth with an information board. And seeing as they thought it might be a good idea to build it in stone, the asked us to give them a hand.

The walk starts just above the village of Swanston, near where we previously built a memorial seat to Donald Graham, a former president of the Friends of the Pentlands. Two pallets of stone had already been delivered, and the turf cut away.

This job had a few differences to our more usual builds: the dimensions were more critical (as it will need to fit the information board which is to be mounted on it); the sides were build without batter, i.e., vertically; and the whole thing had to be mortared together (so, not really a 'dry' stone structure at all - but built on dry stone principles anyway). The stone was old building stone, which was good for this job as it was mostly pretty well squared off.

There were quite a few of us there (three SESDSWA and four FotP), but as the plinth was quite small (84 by 59 cm, to be exact) only one or two people could really work on it at a time. So I didn't feel guilty about taking some time out (and my family, who'd tagged along) for lunch up at the Donald Graham memorial seat. There was a heavy shower just as we got there, but it soon cleared, and the high back worked as designed, sheltering us from the breeze.

After lunch we walked up the hill to visit the 'fairy dell' - an old quarry, probably for the (now collapsed) dry stone wall that runs across the hillside below it. There's another dry stone seat there, built by ourselves and the FotP two years ago (and repaired last year). One end had once again started to collapse.

So I put it back up again.

When we got back down, the plinth was nearing completion.

We put sloping stones were on the top, where the information board will be mounted.

The forecast had predicted heavy rain between three and five p.m., and sure enough at five to three, it started to come down - I just managed to grab this shot before we had to run for cover.

I'll pop back at some point after the board's been fixed so you can see the finished result.