Traprain wall repair

Last weekend we were at Traprain in East Lothian, repairing a collapsed section of wall for Sunnyside riding stables, It's a beautiful location, with Traprain Law in the near distance. The original wall was mortared, but the mortar had long since crumbled and the wall was almost completely collapsed, with the gap being closed by pallets.
(Apologies for the poor quality of Saturday's photos ... I think my old phone has finally reached the end of its usability).

The site was quite overgrown, and it looked like the collapse had been ongoing for some time as a lot of the stone was buried on the lower side of the wall.

Once we'd got things tidied up a bit it was clear that we didn't have enough stone to complete the job: this is quite common when repairing mortared walls with dry stone work, partly because some of the volume of the wall has previously been made of mortar, and partly because mortared walls have vertical (or near-vertical) sides, whereas dry stone walls need to be wider at the base.

There was, however, a lot of stone visible in the field, so we set off to quarry some, with varying degrees of success.

After having to give up on one stone which turned out to have iceberg-like hidden portions we managed to get a few barrow-loads, which was enough to be getting on with.

By about 3pm we reckoned we'd done enough, and Richard, John and I returned home, leaving Dave at the site where, after repast at the pub in nearby East Linton, he was camping for the night.

On Sunday we returned to find Dave had survived his night in the wild. Sam also brought his 'proper' camera, so despite it being a wetter day, Sunday's photos look much less like they're under water.

John couldn't make it along on Sunday, but his place was ably filled by Rosie, so we actually had one more dyker than the previous day, and the building continued apace.

By late morning we only needed to put the copes on - the only issue being that we didn't have enough. Richard went off to find some more.

In the end we had to cheat a bit and use a couple of pairs of smaller stones, but this shouldn't greatly weaken the wall, and it looks fine. 

There's another, larger gap further down the wall: it's a pleasant site and it would be nice to go back, but they'll need to find a lot more stone to make it viable.