Wall repair at Cubbiedean

Today we were in the Pentland Hills Regional Park again, rebuilding a collapsed wall near Cubbiedean reservoir. I got there a bit early, and while waiting for the others to turn up realised I was parked across the valley from where we'd repaired a corner of a field wall a couple of years ago (see posts from August and October 2015 - actually that's closer to three years ago ... how time flies ... ) so I walked over to see how it was holding up. A few stones had come loose or fallen out, particularly under the cope on the sloping section of the wall, but this was easy enough to fix. You get a nice view from this point, but the day was a bit grey so it doesn't look so good in the picture.

The site for today's work was further up the valley, so after I'd returned to my car, met Dave walking up the hill, and somehow missed Alan, I scrounged a lift from Richard who was driving all the way up to the Cubbiedean reservoir as he had some big tools to take up. We passed Dave and Alan on the way, and gave Alan a lift, too (there wasn't room for Dave - though in the event, after tool unloading and discussion about which was the shortest walk from the road, he got to the site before the rest of us). When we got to the site we found Ian was there already, having walked in from Currie on the other side of the hill.

We were rebuilding a section of wall at a corner where a burn runs under the wall. The wall beside the burn had completely collapsed, largely into the burn.

And there was another small collapsed section a few yards down the wall.

As you can see from the photos, there is a fence right by the wall here, which meant that we could only really work from the burn side - and at the top next to the corner, this basically meant standing in the burn. We reckoned we wouldn't be needing the cope stones until the end, and as they were pretty big and pretty regularly shaped, we dropped a few of them into the water to stand on while we worked.

Once we'd cleared away the collapsed stone and dug out the earth which had either seeped or been washed down into the wall, we could see that some of the lower stones sloped out of the wall, meaning that anything built on them would tend to just fall back into the water. So we dug them out, and replaced them with more level ones.

You could really only get a couple of people in to work her, so while Richard and I tackled this, Ian and Alan fixed the gap further down the wall. Dave, meanwhile, dammed  the burn on the other side of the wall, creating a small lake and greatly reducing the amount of water available for us to accidentally step into.

Ian and Alan made short work of repairing their bit of wall, and if you hadn't been told you wouldn't know it ever had been otherwise.

I generously let Ian have a turn in the water, and he and Richard got the next few courses on much more securely than they had been. 

However, in the process of getting the wall rebuilt we had to take down some more of the stone, and discovered that the corner was largely just a pile of loose stones, with a whopping run joint right up the vertex.

At about 12.30 we stopped for lunch, except for Alan, who seemed to want a turn at the soggy end of the wall. Mind you, he has steel toe-capped wellies, so his socks won't have got as wet as mine did. Richard had to leave us at this point, but we'd got the wall over half way up, and gone at least some way to fixing the running joint.

An hour or so's more work had the wall pretty much complete, with only some leveling out to do before the copes could go on.

By three o'clock we'd got it all done, and the sun even came out so that I could get a nice picture of the finished work. And the wall stayed put during the torrent when the dam was removed, so I'm pretty hopeful it'll survive for a bit.