Swanston culverts (and seat) revisited

As I mentioned in the last post, we didn't manage to finish the culvert wall at Swanston on our last visit due to a lack of stone. So today we went back with more stone, and finished it off.
Though overcast, at least today the clouds were above the hilltops - compare the below with the same shot taken the last time I was here (see post of 19th June).

Due to improvements in the Dunbar train service, I was a mere hour late - previously, if I'd taken the first train out of Dunbar on a Sunday, I'd've been three hours late ... I suppose I should be thankful for small mercies ...
When I arrived work had already started on the coping (see last post for previous partially-coped state).

There was a bit of footling about to do, as we were mortaring on the cope (I know, hardly 'dry' stone, but needs must with a low wall next to a popular public path), but by lunch time we'd got it finished.

After lunch we walked up to the top culvert wall - the uphill side of this was fine, but the downhill side was much damaged, even though it had only been two months since we put it up. This is the problem with low walls beside public paths - unless the copes are huge stones, it's too easy for passers-by (and/or their dogs/children) to knock them off, and once the cope's off, the rest of the wall will soon come down.

Even though the upper wall hadn't been damaged, we decided to mortar on the copes, and after rebuilding the lower wall, we mortared its copes as well. We also anchored each end of the wall with a big stone ... these were below cope level, and needed smaller stones on top to take the wall up to the same height - it looked a bit strange, but it's a lot more secure that it was previously.

Not far from the upper culvert is the curved stone seat we built a few years back (see posts passim), which once again had become dilapidated at the ends - we suspect the local highland cattle may be to blame, for using our cheek ends as scratching posts. The solution is probably to mortar the ends on more securely (they were mortared before, but evidently not enough); however, we'd run out of mortar by this point, so we just rebuilt it for now, and hopefully it can stay up until we get a chance to go back up with some more mortar (we piled loose stones around the foot of the wall, to try to dissuade the cattle a bit).

On our way back down we found that someone had augmented our work on the first culvert wall by adding some stones to the top. I suspect some small people who had seen us building the wall on their way up the hill decided they'd like to have a go themselves on their way back down. So it would seem there is some hope for the youth of today.