Threipmuir revisited

The 2016 South East Scotland dyking season started today in the same place we left off last year, at Threipmuir in the Pentland Hills Regional Park (see previous post - I never did get those photos from Ray). I arrived a little late (having got the idea we were meeting up at the Harlaw visitor's centre, and then, finding the Vanilla Pod kiosk was just opening, further exacerbating my tardiness by stopping to purchase one of their crepes) to find Richard and Dave had already begun taking down a damaged section of wall - as ever, I forgot to take a 'before' photo, so this is about half an hour after I got there when we'd got down to ground level and found the cause of the problem.

The wall looked like it had been repaired here before, but not very well - there was a distinct bulge on one side, and all the hearting seemed to be in the bottom of the wall. What we found was that the foundation stones on the bulging side were set with the upper surface sloping out, meaning the stones on top were gradually sliding out of the wall. So we dug them out and put them back in on the level.

The wall was mostly made of soft red sandstone, which is quite nice to work with as it's usually fairly easy to shape (I say usually - there were still a few times I gave a stone a knock to remove an awkwardly placed protuberance and found myself holding more than one stone). By coffee break time we'd got the first foot or so back up.

And by lunch we'd got the 'through' level on.

The threatened rain held off for the most part, and we even had brief outbreaks of sunshine. By 2 pm we were ready to put the copes back up:

and as these had been neatly removed and stacked nearby (not too recently, judging by the amount of grass growing through them) it didn't take long to put them on.

So, all in all a pretty gentle start to the dyking year. Next meeting is at Wooplaw in the Borders on the 8th of May.