Practical dyking day at Bonaly

Yesterday four of us (Dave, Alan, Richard and myself) met up with a couple of the Friends of the Pentlands (Iain and John) to do some work in (no surprises here) the Pentlands. We had a couple of things we wanted to tackle: there was a wall at the Bonaly car park which was somewhat tumbledown, and there was a corner of a field at Cubbiedean which needed a gap filled.

We decided to tackle the car park repair first, as that's where most of us would be starting from anyway, having just parked our cars.

The wall here is no longer needed, so the idea was to take down the broken bit and put a neat end on what remained, with the leftover stone being later moved by the park rangers to another site to be reused.

It was chucking it down when we arrived, but I'd been assured by Richard that it would clear up in an hour or two.

And clear up it duly did. By mid-morning we'd cleared away the broken-down wall and had made a start on a neat cheek-end close to the corner. We were a bit disappointed to find that there had been no long 'through' stones in the bit of wall we'd dismantled, which gave us a bit of a challenge putting together a structurally sound cheek-end.

The next problem we encountered was that when the rain stopped, the midges came out - in force. If I had to choose, I'd've gone for the all-day downpour!

Dave had to head off after a couple of hours, and the midges got too much for John (who didn't have a midge-net, and - as I'd given my only midge repellent to Alan who was also netless -  considering how much I've been bitten myself despite wearing one I can only imagine how eaten alive he must be), so he headed off too. The rest of us carried on, and by lunchtime the cheek-end was up - not a bad job at all, I'd say, given the lack of long stone.

We retired uphill a bit to a stone stell (built - as was the wall we'd just taken down - by our chairman Richard) for lunch. This was a bit less midgey than where we'd been working. But only a bit: most of us kept our anti-midge nets on for lunch (note to self: invest in coffee-cup with integral straw).

After lunch we went and had a look at the Cubbiedean site, but as it was getting on for mid-afternoon by that point we decided not to tackle it that day - Richard and I stayed on to put up a bit of the wall there that had started to come down (working on the theory that a stone in time saves nine) while the others headed home (I forgot to take photos of this, but we'll be going back to do the outstanding repairs, so I'll (try and) remember to take some then).