If you've been following the blog, you'll know that we've been working on a dry stone bridge and nearby walls at Wooplaw Community Woodland. Some of our members were keen to try to get this finished, or at least more finished, before the winter set in, so last weekend we had an 'extra' visit to the site - report and photos by Mike.

There were 5 of us - Richard, Alan, Dave (who arrived via the new Borders Waverley line and then walked up from Stow), myself and Steve: however, we weren't the only ones there as the woods were filled with camp fires and the smell of breakfast cooking. Over the weekend there was a gathering of 'bush-crafters' in the woods and seeing some of their awnings I didn't envy them being bivouacked in the woods on the coldest night of the year so far! Speaking to a couple of them, they had travelled from as far as Newcastle and Chesterfield, so Wooplaw must be something of an attraction.

e almost completed the remaining section of wall to join our bridge, but a combination of Steve leaving at lunchtime, Dave excavating tons of mud to create a 'paved Roman road' and the rest of us finishing early to watch the World Cup rugby, meant that the task is still not quite finished.You can see from the photos what is basically needed is another outing to level up and put copes on.

Today we went back to Cubbiedean* to work once again with the Friends of the Pentlands (or in this case, Friend of the Pentlands, as only Hamish could make it) to continue closing the gateway and repairing the walls around it (see previous post for details of the start of the job). No prizes for guessing if I remembered to take a 'before' picture this time, but this is the state of affairs after we'd been at it for a hour or so.

* From looking at the map the site is really half way between Bonaly and Torduff, but as I've started calling it Cubbiedean in previous posts, and as Cubbiedean is just around the corner, I'll just continue with this.

We had several new wallers with us today, but they'd all been well taught (as you'd expect, having been on one of our courses) and work progressed apace - by lunchtime we'd got up for enough for to get one of two 'muckle stanes' we'd earmarked for the corner in place:

by about two o'clock we'd got some of the copes on and were nearly ready for the rest of them:

and by three we'd got the other muckle stane on:

and, indeed, finished the rest of the wall.

Well ... almost. We could've got it completed, but for the fact that we were short of a couple of meter's worth of cope stones. But not to worry, there should be no problem to get some delivered to the site, and it shouldn't take long to put them in place.

And I think the completed badger lunkey deserves a mention, though it's maybe a bit small for most badgers ... hedgehog lunkey, perhaps?