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.
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