Wall repairs at Harlaw

Today we were back at Harlaw in the Penlands to fix a couple of collapsed sections of dyke along the west side of the reservoir. A lot of this wall is close to collapse, and we've had to take the decision to just deal with the sections that are actually coming down, and leave the sections that look like they're going to fall down at any moment until they actually do.

We had to negotiate our way over a ditch, a barbed wire fence and the wall itself, but fortunately there was a style over the wall with the barbed wire covered at that point as well, and the water levels had subsided somewhat from last week, when (according to Dave, who'd passed that way on Wednesday) we'd've needed a canoe to get across.

The first section in need of attention wasn't really big enough for four people to work on, so Steve and I stayed there while Dave and Alan went on to the next bit. We managed to lever the barbed wire a foot or two from the wall, but it was awkward working around it. By mid-morning we'd got the collapsed stone out and the re-done the foundations

and by about midday we'd got the wall up about half way. 

Unfortunately,by this point it was becoming very clear that we didn't have enough building stone to finish the job.The problem was that the wall had originally been built with traced stone (i.e. the stone laid along the wall lengthways, like brickwork) and then just infilled with rubble - so we ended up with lots of hearting (i.e. small stones to fill between the two sides of the double dyke), but not enough good stone to build the sides with.
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Chris showed up just before one, so I left him and Steve  to do as much as they could with the stone they had and headed along with Dave, who'd popped back to pick up his lunch, to the other collapsed section.

This was a bigger collapse, and Dave and Alan had cleared the wall down to ground level for about four metres.

Sadly, this section of wall suffered from the same malaise as the first, and indeed the entire thing appears to have been built in the same way, leaving the whole wall in a precarious state - in fact, we had to widen the gap here by another metre or so as the next section along was in danger of imminent collapse as well. Someone has attempted to strengthen it by mortaring the cope at some point, which has probably just hastened it's demise.

There was a largish boulder of a different type of stone which had been added to the wall at some point: it wasn't great to build with, being somewhat wedge shaped and too wide for the wall really, and normally we'd'be been a bit reticent about using it, but in this case with us being short of stone we decided to build it in.

Chris came along and joined us after an hour or so, he and Steve having done as much as they could at the first site, and with his help we got the wall up to through-stone level by mid-afternoon.

By this time we were getting up close to barbed wire level, making it very tricky to work on that side of the wall - the fence posts were in more firmly here than at the first site, so we hadn't been able to lever the fence so far from the wall.

I had to head off at four, so I left the others to it and headed back to the car park.

Steve and Chris had managed to complete more of the first gap than I'd expected - pretty impressive, considering the material they had to work with.

We'll need to ask the rangers to deliver some more stone so we can get these sections completed, but really this whole wall needs rebuilt properly.