Harlaw again

Today we returned to Harlaw (see pre-previous post) with the idea of completing the work we started last time. However, after a discussion with a couple of the rangers, who told us the problem tree was scheduled to be felled but hadn't yet been dealt with, we decided just to do some other repairs and complete the original work when the tree had gone. The walls at Harlaw have many places in need of attention, so we just picked the first couple we came to near the visitor centre where we'd met up.

The first gap wasn't very big, so it wasn't long before it was put right.

The second, however, was a bit bigger, and it initially looked like we'd be a bit short of stone for it, but somehow we had some left over from the first repair. I'm not quite sure how this happened - I can only assume that either we rebuilt the wall thinner than it previously had been, or that some additional stone had been dumped over the wall at the point of collapse. These walls were originally build with mortar, and they have lots of gaps in them, so it's normal for us to have a shortage of stone.

There wasn't really enough space for us all to work, so Jeff and Derek went a bit further along to where there was another small gap in need of rebuilding.

By lunchtime we'd got both these sections complete as well.

After lunch we again split into two groups. The next gap was about as big as the biggest of the morning ones, but the wall had collapsed right from very nearly the bottom of the wall.

We ran short of stone on this section as well, and had to resort to using very small stuff near the top. The copes are very tightly wedged in, which should help, but I think we may need to revisit this bit with some better stone for the top courses at some point.

A bit further down the from this was a big section which had come down. I remembered to take a couple of photos of what it looked like before we started on this one ... somewhere in amongst the nettles and bracken are the missing stones, we hope ...

Once we'd cleared away the undergrowth it was clear what the problem was here - the whole wall had fallen inwards and had shifted off it's foundations by about four inches.

The only solution here was to take the whole wall down and rebuild it from the bottom up.

We came across a couple of inhabitants of the wall while we were taking it down ...

Astra rescued them both and put them out of harm's way. They'll find plenty of good places to live once the wall been put back up dry.
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We ran out of time before we could start the rebuild - we'll be back in a couple of weeks to put it all back together.