In previous years we've assisted with the West of Scotland Dry Stone Walling Association's show garden at Gardening Scotland. However, this year they decided not to enter, so rather than allow the public to be completely deprived of any dry stone walling* we put on a walling demonstration (being too small a branch to tackle a show garden ourselves). This meant that there was no "build weekend" - instead, on Thursday Richard and I went along and set up our new event shelter and banners, while Bruce brought along a couple of trailer loads of stone, borrowed for the weekend from a job he's working on.
Bruce, Richard and Ian then went along on Friday and built a few metres of wall with a cheek end, a corner, a bend and a little alcove (Richard borrowed a plant to put in it - it is a gardening show, after all). They got quite a lot built, despite stopping to talk to interested show goers. On Saturday Dave was there on his own and as a result was largely occupied with talking to the gardening public but did manage a bit more building, and then today Richard returned and I joined him, so that one of us could deal with questions while the other built (or bunked off to take photos).
It was quite good having a partly built wall, as it gave us an opportunity to show how a dry stone wall is put together in such a way that what's basically a pile of stones can stay up for centuries.
There was a lot of positive feedback (even some from farmers - stern critics of dry stone work).
And by lunch time we'd got the corner pretty much completed and about half of the straight bit coped.
In the afternoon the rain which had been threatening all day arrived, so we retreated to the shelter for a while. We got a bit more built after it went off, but by this time we'd used up almost all of the stone, and it was getting close to closing time anyway.
By four o'clock the crowds were thinning out, and those that were left were heading for the gardening exhibits to grab some ex-show bargains, so we started to take it down again, and by six our "lasts for centuries" wall was back on the trailers.
* This wouldn't actually have been the case, as one of the show gardens also had some dry stone work - quite nice work, too, though as you can see it was badly obscured by plants.
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