Last weekend saw the first outing of this year, working with the Friends of the Pentlands to build a couple of circular dry stone raised beds at the Pentland Hills Regional Park visitor centre at Flotterstone. The site was next to where we'd previously built a circular seat in the stell, or sheep pen, so the constructions should match.
In keeping with tradition, I forgot to take a 'before' photo - and in fact, some work had been done before we arrived, with some stone piled up ready for us to start building. The first thing we needed to do was dig out a couple of circular troughs for the foundations.
This done, we could start to put in the stone.
The weather was somewhat variable, with the bright sun occasionally obscured by wintery rain or even snow showers coming down at us from the hills behind.
Fortunately, we were right by the visitor centre so we could avoid the worst of the weather. They even provided an indoor wall for us to work on while we were sheltering.
Some of our hardier dykers continued regardless of what the elements were throwing at them, and the beds began to take shape.
Once the walls were built all that remained was to fill the beds with earth, ready for planting.
We even managed to get one bed 'planted up' ... (proper planting up to follow ... I'll try and get some photos of them in bloom later in the summer).
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