Swanston culvert

 Last weekend (sorry for the delay in posting this) we executed a little project in association with the Friends of the Pentlands to build a couple of dykes over a culvert on the path above Swanston in the Pentland Hills Regional Park.

I was a little (well, to be strictly accurate, quite a lot) late. It had been overcast all morning, and as I headed up towards the site I could see the cloud coming down the hills just above the housing line.

On the way up I passed the plinth we build last year to mark the start of the Pentland Way (see posts passim) - good to see it still standing.

As I got up towards the build site I could see the cloud level getting worryingly close ...

... but when I turned the corner I could see that we were (just) below it, for the time being at least.

I arrived in time for lunch (wouldn't've wanted to miss that) to discover that I wasn't the only thing which hadn't been on site first thing that day: there had been a misunderstanding over the delivery of the stone and hasty arrangements had had to be made to get a trailerful up there so that work could commence. This meant that we didn't have as much stone as we'd expected, and so the wall had had to be made quite a bit smaller than originally planned. Dave and Richard along with Ian from the FotP had already completed the uphill side.

After lunch Chris showed up as well, and we got on with the other wall.

The culvert is formed by a plastic pipe (Ian had gallantly run down the hill earlier to fetch a saw to cut it to the correct length), so on the more visible downhill side we constructed an arch over it (stronger, as well as looking nicer).

And by about 3 pm we'd got it completed. Being in an exposed site, I expect we'll really need to mortar on the end copes, but hopefully it'll survive until we get a chance to do that.

And despite my concerns, the cloud level didn't descend, at least not until after we'd packed up and gone.