Blog Archives

Wall repair at Clubbiedean

21/4/2019

Well today was the hottest Easter ever in Scotland, and the hottest place was Edinburgh, so I've managed to sunburn my balding head, despite resorting to a hat an hour before the sun reached its zenith.

Today we were at Clubbiedean Reservoir in the Pentland Hills Regional Park, repairing a section of collapsed wall beside the trout fishery car park. I had intended to walk from the car park at Bonaly but I was running late so I just drove all the way up - I passed Dave by Torduff and gave him a lift for the last kilometer or so.

There was a fair amount of traced stone in the wall, which may have contributed to its collapse - either that or there's a less than careful fisherman somewhere with a dent on the back of his car ...

Susan and Alan showed up while we were taking the wall down. It might have been a bit awkward working at the back of a car park, but fortunately there was a gap between the cars by the collapsed bit of wall, which we claimed by putting the copes there.

Once we'd got the loose stone out (the foundations and some of the lower parts of the wall were still fine), Dave produced a 'thyme capsule' - a herb jar, into which we inserted one of our business cards with the date written on before building it into the bottom of the wall.

Around lunchtime some of the fisherman headed off, which gave us a bit more room to work in. The wall at this point is quite low, and by early afternoon we were up above through height.

And not long after we were just leveling the top ready for the copes.

As we were getting the copes on Chris showed up - just in time for the heavy work, though fortunately we didn't have to lift them very high. By about 2 pm we had the wall fully back up.

Alan and Susan had come up the same way as Dave and I and accepted the offer of a lift back down, and we left Chris finishing his coffee and biscuits before heading back to his car at the other end of the reservoir.

0 Comments

Wooplaw cheekend revisited

7/4/2019

0 Comments

Today a few of us started the season with a return to Wooplaw Community Woodland, in the Borders (see numerous past blog posts). It was a pretty cold and damp day, though the rain had pretty much stopped by the time we arrived.

The field where we were working before now has bulls rather than horses in it, so we decided to do some work at the other end of the site, near the where the new cabin is being constructed to replace the old one which was burnt down by vandals last year. They're getting on pretty well with it, and have even made the walls of dry stone (sort of).

We bumped into Stephen in the car park, a branch member who is also involved in Wooplaw, and he informed us that during the work the cheekend near the cabin (which we had rebuilt before) had got knocked down. It's a bit of a tight turn, even for the wee tractor they have, so we decided to take down the end of the wall and rebuild it a bit further back.

This did mean that we had quite a bit of work to do taking down the end four feet or so of wall, but at least it meant we had no shortage of stone to build with.

When we started rebuilding we found that we had no poles to attach the lines to, so we improvised with a couple of sticks. Not the straightest of guides, but perhaps in keeping with the existing, somewhat sinuous, wall.

There wasn't really room for three people to work on building the cheekend, so Alan headed off a bit further down to where there was some remedial work required on another wall we'd previously repaired (the damage most likely caused by children using the rope swing, though, rather than tractors). Dave and I got the cheeked up to about through height before deciding it was time to break for lunch.

Meanwhile, Alan had finished repairing the other wall.

Fortunately the barbecue shelter hadn't been destroyed by the fire, so we were able to get out of the drizzle and drips from the trees to eat our lunch. It was still pretty chilly though, and I think we were all pretty happy to get back to work. By about 2:30 we'd got the cheekend back up and had cleared away the unused stone from the path.

If it had been a warmer, dryer day we might have decided to tackle a few more wee repairs, but as it was we just decided to call it a day.

0 Comments

Wall repair at Clubbiedean

Wooplaw cheekend revisited

Author

Archives

Categories