Once of our members, David, was passing Balgreen yesterday and took this photo of the wall we worked on earlier this year.

It was good to see that the work has progressed on the landscaping - and, of course, that the wall was still up ...

On Saturday we had a stall at the Fife Agricultural Show at Cupar. Unlike the other shows we do (Haddington and Peebles - on the 27th of June and the 15th of August respectively this year, if you're interested in coming along) they didn't give us a pile of stone to play with, just a patch of grass between the sheep pens and the burn which flows through the site. They told us we weren't to keep the car at the site so we dutifully moved it to the car park, but some others nearby just left theirs behind their stalls. 

It was a cracking day - sunny but not too hot, with a bit of a breeze but not so much that we were constantly running after our leaflets. And after I'd moved the banner which I'd not very cleverly put across where our faces would be if we were standing in the stall we had a nice view of the sheep.

In lieu of an actual wall we had a table top mini walling kit. I built a demo wall for people to try to copy. Not my best work, but if you consider the largest stone was less than two inches long, not too terrible either. There was a shortage of hearting, so at least that was realistic.

Various people came over and had a go, a remarkable number of whom struggled to get over their preconceptions of how a wall should built - either that or there were a lot of bricklayers at the show this year. However, there were some who got the idea, including a few natural wallers who got it right without any prompting (I asked one lady who was making a very good job of the base level why she'd picked the stones she was using and she couldn't explain it more than to say, "They just seem right" - she was bang on, as well, all the same thickness, paired up so that they made the same length. Wasted in whatever it is she does, I'd say.). Most got the hang of it after a bit of help - here are a couple of the better efforts.

We had lots of interest and numerous words of support - there certainly seem to be a lot of Fifers who like dry stone walls. We didn't sell any books this time, but we had quite a few people interested in our courses and some people came over from a nearby community project ("Lucky Ewe", it's called) which might be a future project site for us.

Getting out of the show proved a bit of a nightmare as there was only one entrance/exit we could use, and the trade stands (i.e. us) had to wait to bring our vehicles in until all the livestock was moved - a process which took well over an hour. We gave up waiting and started moving the stuff out to the car by hand, which turned out to need about ten journeys back and forth carrying as much as we could lift each time. Predictably, they started letting the trade vehicles in just as we got the last of the stuff out, but at least it meant we got away smartly. If we do the show again I think we might just do as the others did and "forget" to take the car back to the car park ...

​On the way home I dropped the gazebo etc. off at our training site at Merryhill. There was a training course going on over the weekend, and by the Saturday evening they'd done a pretty good job of the bottom two-thirds or so of the wall.

And here's the finished job on Sunday afternoon, with the (rightly) proud builders (thanks to Kevin for the photo).

And it turned out my signs weren’t completely wasted as the site is a bit off the beaten track and they were useful to a couple of members who turned up who hadn’t been here before. There was a wee collapsed section next to where the training was going on, so we set to work on that.

This past Friday, Saturday and Sunday saw us revisit Threipmuir and Harlaw for another Youth Vision walling workshop and some more repairs to the walls around the reservoir.
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(On the way to the build site I spotted a place where a cope stone had come off the wall ...

... so I put it back on again).

There was about 10m of wall needing rebuilt, suffering from the same issues that all the Threipmuir/Harlaw walls exhibit. This section was particularly bad, and we ended up having to take it right down to the ground for a lot of the length.

This done we were able to start to rebuild the wall. To begin with we had plenty of good sized stone, and were only hampered by the occasional inconveniently placed buried rock.

We came across a couple of palmate newts which had made their home in the wall. With a little encouragement they crawled into their transport to a new home nearby.

The foundation went in very nicely - almost a text book example of how to do a dry stone foundation.

The next few courses went on pretty easily as well.

And by the end of the day on Friday we'd got some bits up to through level.

On Saturday we only had two of our workshop volunteers, but a new Youth Vision recruit joined us for the day so we still had plenty of dykers. We had to hunt about a bit for stone, but the Youth Vision people helped us barrow down some from where a gap had been made in their boundary wall so we were able to continue.

And by late afternoon we were ready to put the copes on.

Some of the copes were a couple of feet long and pretty hard to deal with - you really needed three or four people to get them on to the wall. However after much perseverance, and a raiding trip to another nearby collapsed section for the last few copes, we got it completed.

And to prove it was solid, John walked along it. Maybe not quite level enough to wheel a barrow along, but not too far off.

There are still a couple of sections at Youth Vision needing done, so hopefully we can get another workshop organised to get them fixed as well.

Sunday was just a DSWA build day, and perhaps because we'd had people out the previous two days only a couple of us turned up. There were a few places near the Harlaw visitor centre (now sadly shut) which needed a bit of TLC and which could be tackled by one or two people. The most obvious was a spot where people had been climbing over, and the copes had come off.

And on closer inspection, some of the work below the copes wasn't really up to scratch either.

Once we'd stripped out the defective bits we were a bit short of stone, so we commandeered a squarish field stone. This resulted in a few of the copes being a bit high, but if this discourages people from climbing over as this point then all the better.

Once we'd climbed over the wall we could see that there were another couple of places nearby which were collapsing as well.

So we patched these up too.

There were a few other small repairs which were good for a couple of people to tackle - like this spot where a previous repair had been done, but was now failing.

Once again we needed to hunt about for stone, but once we'd found some near another previous repair we were able to put it all back a bit more neatly.

And there was even enough to fix up another wee collapse a bit further along.

After lunch we took a walk along the whole length of the wall on this side of the loch, and only found one other place in need of attention, where the stones had started to come away under the copes.

Again, once we started to look at it we found that the problem went a bit deeper than the immediately visible damage - the wall here was built like a "treble dyke" with three traced layers. We ended up taking the top few courses down and rebuilding them.

That looked like we'd done all that was pressing on this bit of wall, but while I'd been waiting around in the car park for the others (or as it turned out, other) to arrive I'd spotted a couple of places there needing attention. The biggest was too big for a couple of people to tackle (and would also need the barbed wire fence that runs along it moved and a section of the car park coned off), but there was a little collapse which we could tackle without too much difficulty.

We had to crawl under the barbed wire and negotiate some pine trees to get round to where we could work on it, but once we'd done so we could see that most of the stone was still there.

It was awkward working from only one side because of the cars and the barbed wire and the space was cramped between the trees and the wall, but we managed to get it back into shape.

There's lots more needing done here, so I expect we'll be back at some point.

​Thanks to Sam ,John and Ezra for some of the photos.

The last weekend in April saw the branch heading to Dungarthill near Dunkeld. The wall here has been worked on over several years by CSDSWA, taking down and rebuilding a very unstable wall with our host, Archie, taking time out from running his charity (which takes refurbished pick up trucks with all sorts of aid out to Ukraine) to help out. In theory this was a straight forward build, but as the dyke was bordered on one side by a burn and a fence on the other, the conditions were somewhat cramped, especially as space was needed to stack the stones from the dismantled wall.

On the Saturday seven DSWA members were rewarded with warm sunshine following the early fog. There were alpacas in the field next to the build, who were curious at to what was going on, and seemed very taken with Gordon's beard ...

On Sunday the team was reduced to five DSWA folks (four from the day before plus one new attendee). Fortunately the good weather continued and by the end of the day the section started on Saturday was completed, and there was also time to cope another section of wall.

​Archie was very happy with the work, and as what's left is a straight line and clear for building he's happy to tackle it himself, though both he and ourselves will miss our annual visits.

Thanks to Robert for the photos, and to Trish, Robert, Archie and Dave for updates.

This weekend we teamed up with the Friends of the Pentlands and Youth Vision to provide a walling workshop at Youth Vision's facility near Harlaw in the Pentland Hills Regional Park. The walls here are the same as at other points around Harlaw (see numerous previous posts) - built quickly to a half-dry-half-mortared design which is prone to collapse in on itself. This, coupled with damage caused by people climbing over the collapsed sections of the wall, is what had happened at Youth Vision. The idea of the workshop was to provide an introduction to dry stone walling for anyone interested while also repairing the damaged walls.

We were originally expecting about ten people coming along to learn on the Friday but in the end we had only four novices: these, plus five members of the branch, four FotP and four Youth Vision people meant we had seventeen volunteers working on the repairs.

There were are few sections which needed work. Youth Vision had strimmed back the briars and nettles from one collapsed section, so we started on that while some of their people worked on clearing away the other places needing work.

The issue we so often find with these walls showed itself again: when we cleared down a collapsed section, the next bit of wall along started to come down as well. The whole thing really is very fragile.

Another issue we had was lack of stone: as these walls have been built with insufficient infill ("hearting", in dry stane dyking parlance) they are partly hollow, and so rebuilding them correctly requires additional stone. We were able to "borrow" some from other nearby collapsed areas, and when one of the rangers showed up with a pickup truck we were able to drive around the reservoir and pick up more which had been left over from previous repairs. However, by the time we knocked off for lunch (delicious soup provided by Youth Vision) we'd pretty much run out of useful stone.

Lunch was in the garden of Youth Vision's 18th century cottage, which was a ruin but which is now roofed over and provides a secure workshop and space to store their equipment as well as a kitchen. There was some stone in the area around the cottage which we were able to barrow down after lunch so we were able to continue working and by the end of the day we were pretty much up to sub-cope height.

On Saturday it was blowing a gale with the wind blowing grit and bits of moss off the wall and into our eyes. None of our trainees showed up but we still had five members (two new ones, and three that had been there the day before) plus two FotP and two Youth Vision people. Our friendly ranger showed up as well with another truckload of stone, and by the end of the morning we'd got the section of wall coped and finished.

After lunch we tackled another section of wall which had started to come down. This one wasn't so bad, and the lower courses were OK to leave as they were.

And by the end of the day, we'd got this up to sub-cope level as well.

Most of us couldn't make it along on the Sunday, but Astra and AJ volunteered to come back and put the copes on.

And here's proof both of the solidity of the wall and AJ's sense of balance.

There was another collapsed wall we'd been notified of by the Pentland rangers, a few miles up the road at Harperrig. I'd been hoping to get away to have a look at it myself on Friday or Saturday but in the event had been too busy, so Astra and AJ had very kindly agreed to take a look at it on Sunday. It's a more typical dry stone wall so it doesn't have the problems that the Harlaw walls have, but when they got there they found the wall much worse for wear than the photos had showed. The wall had slid in on the inside of the field area due to water table increases and a sloped stone that everything had been sat on, with the inside a full foot or so lower than the roadside, so they had some work to clear it all.

I've emailed the rangers to ask if we can get some more stone delivered to finish off the repair. We'll be back in the vicinity again in a month or so for another workshop with Youth Vision, so hopefully we'll get both jobs done then.

Yesterday we returned to Balgreen to repair a wall we originally built ten years ago (see blog post https://www.sesdswa.org.uk/blog/balgreen-seat). SGN had had to knock down the end of the wall to install a new pipe, and subsequently to this the remaining wall had been vandalised, with the top half of the wall pushed over.

I'd expected to find a pile of stone from the section which had been demolished by SGN, but this wasn't there (and in fact, thinking about it I do recall something about it being moved when the demolition happened last year). This meant that we were limited in what we could do by the stone that we had, so we decided to work along from the original end which was still standing, and just stop when we'd run out of stone.

And by lunchtime we'd got most of the wall back up to sub-cope height.

There still remained the cheek-end rebuild - we'd kept back some longish/squarish stone to do this.

And once that was done, all that was left to do was replace the copes. The Water of Leith people had given us some lime mortar to stick the copes on with - not 'dry', but necessary in an urban environment.

Lime mortar needs to be kept wet while it's drying (sounds odd, but it sets by a chemical reaction with the water - if it just dries out it goes crumbly). We'd been provided with a hessian sheet to soak and drape over the wall, but it was a bit short so we cut it into three, and managed to cover most of the wall.

The original plan had been to return the next day but the limited stone supply meant we got as much done as could be in one day, so we called off the return visit. And the forecast for the next day was light rain - perfect conditions for setting lime mortar, but maybe not so good for dyking.

Last weekend we (ably aided by some volunteers from the Friends of the Pentlands) returned to Harlaw to complete the work we'd started on the curved corner where the tree had taken the wall down (see posts below), and also to build up cheek-ends next to where a new self-closing gate had been installed. Saturday was dry and bright, if a tad chilly, and fortunately the build site was among trees so we were sheltered from the worst of the wind.

Before the gate had been put in there had been a squeeze style here, but it hadn't lasted. One cheek-end from it still remained, but it wasn't aligned with the new gate, so it needed to come down and be rebuilt.

The park rangers had left us a big pile of stone ...

... so we set about building up the new cheek-ends.

And by lunch time we'd got them both completed.

The rangers had also left us some more stone along near the unfinished curve (see previous posts) so after lunch a few of us went along to finish this off ...

... while the rest used some of the remaining stone at the new gate to tackle a section of collapsing wall nearby.

This was one of those places (all too common on the Harlaw walls) where once you start work, you quickly find the problem is worse than it initially appeared, and a lot more of the wall needs to come down before it can all be put back up again.

The stone which had been left for us at the curve proved adequate for the job, but most of the copes had been lost. Fortunately there were some in the stone stash along near the new gate, and once these were barrowed along (well done Sam) the repair could be completed.

By this point it was getting a bit late in the day, so we packed up and headed home.

Sunday wasn't such a nice day, but we didn't let that put us off, and once again helped by volunteers from the Friends of the Pentlands we picked up where the repair to the collapsed wall had been left the day before.

And by lunch time it was done.

By this time the rain had stopped, so we decided to tackle another collapsed section of the wall. Again, the repair turned out to be bigger than it initially appeared (the stones on the left of the gap just fell down as soon as they were touched), but it wasn't quite as bad as the previous section, as at least the lower sections of the wall were sound and level.

By mid-afternoon we'd got it all back up, and as the weather had turned a bit threatening again we decided to call it a day. There are plenty more collapsed sections of this wall, however, and there was still stone left from the lot the rangers had provided, so we'll be back again at some point.

Thanks to everyone who came along and helped out, and to Sam (as ever) for the photos.

Last weekend we ran the last of our 2025 beginners' courses in dry stone walling.
We got a great weekend for it (only a little rain on Saturday) and under Stevie's tutelage once again a great job was done.

Dates for 2026 courses will be on this site (under Training courses on the left) in January. Book early, as they tend to sell out!

Last weekend we returned to Harlaw to attempt to finish off the work we'd started on the two previous visits, the tree causing the problem at the corner (see post of 21st August below) having been cut down.
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We started at the section we left dismantled on the 24th of August, and we were happy to see that the site hadn't been touched since we were there last and that the stone was all still there. The day started out bright and sunny, but there were heavy showers forecast for the afternoon.

Looking at the end of the existing wall it's easy to see why it has collapsed in so many places. It's a mortared wall but has been built almost like dry stone - it has a double skin and it has throughs (long stones running right through the wall about half way up) at regular intervals. However, the hearting (the loose rubble within the wall) is inadequate, and the stone skins are traced (so, laid with the length running along the wall). It's like a half-dry-half-mortared method has been used to enable the wall to be built quickly and cheaply, rather than to a decent standard for either technique.

The first job was to get the foundations back in level.

This gave us a good flat base to work from, and we had enough decent stone to get the first few courses in pretty easily. And we had enough through stones - these probably being the only things that had kept the wall up for most of the hundred years or so since it was first built.

When we called it a day on Saturday we still had a foot or so to go before the copes could go on, and apart from a few stones which were too big to use as 'normal' builders and would need to go on as covers (stones running right through the wall just below the copes) we only had small stuff left. All was not lost, however, as one of the rangers had stopped off to mention that he'd dismantled a fire pit a bit further along, and knowing that we'd be coming had moved the stones up to beside the wall, instead of throwing them in the loch as he'd normally have done. There were a few other places we'd spotted stone near the wall, probably left over from previous repairs, so we were hopeful that we'd manage to scavenge enough to complete the job.

There had been a few showers during the day, none of which had come to anything much. But on the way back it came down hard just as we got past the shelter of the wood. We ran for cover, and managed to get in the lee of the visitor centre without getting too soaked.
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​On Sunday we met once again by the visitor centre, and filled up the wheelbarrow with the scavenged stone on the way along to the build site, which gave us enough to get started again.

We needed to make a few more trips with the barrow to get all the stone, and we managed to reclaim some more by improving a previous repair which had been done badly with a big field boulder we'd dug out - too big to use as a builder but a pretty good substitute for the stone which had been put in at the bad repair instead of copes.

Some of the smaller stuff was fine for just-sub-cope, where the weight of the copes would keep it in the wall, and by midday we were ready to put the copes back on.

When we knocked off for lunch the repair was complete, and we even had enough stone left over to take a barrowload along to the next section we were tackling, where the tree had been cut down.

The removal of the tree was good, but I'd failed to either mention to the rangers that it would be good if the woodsmen could remove the tree root in the wall as well as the tree, or to bring a saw so we could cut it out ourselves. After much bashing with the pinch bar and the big hammer, we managed to weaken it enough to twist it out.

Curved corners are the trickiest things to do in dry stone walling, I think (with the exception of special features like stairs or archways). This particular corner wasn't made any easier by the presence of a large fence post right inside the wall. We soldiered on, however, trying to keep the courses level and bring the batter (the slope of the sides) in as we went up.

Fortunately we again had enough through stones which we could use to strengthen the corner.

However, once again we also began to run out of stone just above through level. I suppose it shows how 'economical' the original build has been, that we only get half the wall built before we run out of material.

A quick measurement of the gap revealed we were short of a metre or so of copes as well, despite having found a few which looked like they'd been buried for some time. Faced with these challenges we decided to call it a day.

I've emailed the rangers to ask if we can get some more stone: there's another repair they want us to do, where they're going to replace a collapsed squeeze stile with a gate, so we might manage to reclaim enough stone from that to complete the corner. We usually stop work around this time of year - it was feeling distinctly autumnal on Sunday - but hopefully we'll fit another visit in to get the work completed before winter.
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Thanks to Sam for the photos, and to everyone who came along to help out with the build.