Earlier in the year we heard that the dry stone roundhouse at Wooplaw Community Woodland had been burnt down. This had been built back in 1992 or thereabouts with help from the Scottish Woodlands Trust, and it originally had a thatched roof. I don't think the DSWA was involved with the original project, but they must have had at least one experienced dyker working on it as the walls were properly built with well structured cheek ends on either side of the entrance, and it wasn't surprising that it had stood for over 30 years until it got vandalised.

When we got there last weekend it was dry with some sunshine, and enough of a breeze to keep the midges at bay. The Wooplaw folks had already removed the burnt timbers, and most of the stone was still in place with only one bit of wall badly collapsed. As this was in a better place for the entrance this seemed like a good opportunity to move it.

We found one inhabitant who had decided to stay on despite the fire ...

And also an old Irn Bru bottle embedded in the wall.

It contained some coins and a receipt from the Galashiels Co-op for 20 Embassy cigarettes. Sadly, the water had got in so the date (and the price of 20 fags 30+ years ago) wasn't legible. The coins had been bent to get them into the bottle, so the dates on them weren't readable either.

The stone at Wooplaw is hard greywacke. It tends to be irregular in shape, and it doesn't take well to being hammered - you're more likely to end up with a split right down the middle if you try anything more than minimal shaping. There were some good long pieces, though, which is what you need for cheek ends.

We had a pretty good turnout on the Saturday (nine DSWA members plus a couple of people from Wooplaw), which was too many to work on the roundhouse, but there are lots of walls at Wooplaw so we weren't short of things to do. The woodsmen had found it necessary to knock down a bit of the wall beside the path down to the roundhouse to get their mini tractor in, and they wanted to keep this gap and open up another one opposite to allow for a new circular walk taking in part of the wood which wasn't getting used. They'd marked the route for us in orange paint ...

Sorting this out meant four more cheek ends, so it was good that we had lots of long stone. We had lots of stone generally, in fact, as there was not only the contents of the now demolished sections of wall but there also turned out to be an old stone dump right next to the first cheek end we did (there are several of these dotted about Wooplaw).

There was an ash tree suffering from die-back next to where the last of the cheek ends needed to go which had to come down. It would've been difficult for the tree fellers to work around a newly built wall, and as it was getting late anyway we just cleared away some space around it for them to do their work later that evening.

Meanwhile down at the roundhouse the new doorway was taking shape nicely.

The next day was wetter but still with enough wind to keep the midges away. We were pleased to see that they'd managed to take the tree down without taking any of the wall with it.

I think our cheek ends steadily improved over the weekend, though they all felt pretty solid.

We didn't have so many people on the Sunday (five of the DSWA from the day before plus one new member, plus the two Wooplaw volunteers again) so once we'd done the last of the path cheek ends we all went down to work on the roundhouse. We decided to build a small seat into the inside of the wall where the original entrance had been, so we took down the original cheek ends to allow this to be built properly into the wall.

I didn't have a business card to add to the Irn Bru bottle, but we used a ticket from last week's show (with the show date printed on it) with a note on the back saying "Rebuilt by Wooplaw Community Woodland and East of Scotland DSWA" and the date. The most recent coin we could muster was a 2015 5p piece, so (after a bit of bending) that went in as well.

We built the bottle back into the wall beside the new seat.

We were running a bit sort of stone by the afternoon, so one of the Wooplaw volunteers came with the mini tractor and moved some of the spare stone from the path down for us, and by the end of the day we'd got most of the wall built up.

We'll be back in a couple of weeks to finish off the roundhouse and tackle some of the other projects they have - there's a badger hide which needs some attention, I'm told ...

Thanks to Sam and John for photos, and to Wooplaw for having us, and of course especially to all the volunteers who came along to help out.

Last Saturday we had our annual outing to the Haddington Agricultural Show. It was warm and sunny, but (as has been the case in the past) pretty windy on the exposed East Fortune site. As usual they'd provided us with a trailer load of the local red sandstone to play with, and we'd agreed that they could just leave this on the trailer for us to take as we needed. All well and good - until we tried to get the side down to unload the stone, and found that it was parked just very slightly too close to the tent. After trying to squeeze the side down (no chance) and move the tent pole (absolutely no chance) we finally managed to roll the trailer forward a few inches, and got one of the side flaps down which, once we'd removed the sides of the tent as well, worked perfectly.

They'd set up a couple of tables for us inside the tent as well, where we laid out our books and leaflets and our table-top mini walling set. The wind was blowing directly in through the opening, however, so we had to weigh everything down with hearting (and even so were sent scurrying after things following some particularly strong gusts).

We only really had enough stone to build a couple of meters of wall, and we decided only to take it up to through level for the most part, so we could show people how the wall was put together.

The mini walling kit proved popular again ...

... but not as popular as 'helping' us to build the 'big' wall. We had numerous small helpers, some of whom had remembered us from previous years. It seems we've become something of a show highlight for some budding young wallers, who were very enthusiastic about helping us complete the half-done section - some even willing to forgo watching the BMX stunt bikes in favour of doing some dyking.

I tried to tidy it up as they went along so it didn't present too much of a health hazard ...

As ever we had more people than I could count telling us how much they liked dry stone walls, along with quite a few "it's a dying art" and "how much per meter?" (check for walling bingo). And we must have done a decent job this year as I only had one old farmer asking if I wanted him to show me how it should be done (fair play to him - he'd quite correctly spotted a running joint near the top left). By about 4:30 pm it was quietening down, so we dismantled the wall and put the stone back on the trailer to go back to the farm again, ready for next year.

Thanks to John, James and Sam for coming along to help out, and to Sam for most of the photos, and a massive thank-you to the Haddington Show people for having us once again. 

Last weekend (while Stevie's trainees were working hard at Merryhill) the branch (helped by members of the local community) did some work on the walls at Burmieston farm, just to the north of Perth, which is now run as a combination of an organic smallholding and a retreat centre.
​
I got a bit lost, so by the time I arrived on Saturday morning work was already underway ...

We had a pretty good turnout - eight members of the branch (including our host, Olly) and one local helper. A lot of the stone was big rounded boulders - I expect the largest of them had been cleared from the field, rather than fallen from the wall.

One thing about large stone is that once the wall starts to go up, it tends to go up pretty quickly. The farm dog helped by inspecting our work, and occasionally testing how comfortable a bed it made.

We were provided by our hosts with delicious soup for lunch, served in their old barn (now a games room for their guests). They have a very impressive old threshing machine.

After lunch we continued with the work on the wall. The rain stayed off for the most part, and the breeze kept the midges at bay.

We must have got about 10 meters of wall repaired, and were ready to put the copes on by the end of the afternoon.

Sunday was a warmer day and less windy than the day before. We had only four of the members from Saturday returning, but another couple joined us, plus a new local community helper and a 'WWOOFer' - a volunteer from Willing Workers On Organic Farms, all the way from Australia. We picked up from where we'd finished the day before, with a couple of the local chickens helping us with the digging out ...

We were again provided with lovely home-made soup for lunch, after which another couple of branch members joined us. Once again the big stone made for quick work once we'd got the collapsed wall dug out.

There was a curved corner to be negotiated, with a metal fence post in the middle of it (Olly is going to keep sheep in the enclosure, and he needs to run a wire fence along the top of the wall to make it secure). The big stone came in handy here, both for forming the corner and for supporting the post (which was almost rusted through at the bottom). 

By mid afternoon we'd got the section we'd started on pretty much completed with just the copes needing put on, so we started tackling the section past the corner as well.

I had to leave at about four o'clock, by which time we'd coped the wall as far as the corner and got the next bit up to about half way. 

A few keener (and in some cases, later-starting) folk stayed on to do a bit more, but I don't have any photos of this. So just imagine the photo above, but with a bit more of the wall done ... 

​Thanks to Oliver and Keesje for looking after us so well, and to Sam for the photos.

And here, at the request of Dr John March, is a photo of me walking along the wall. It was easily solid enough to walk along - the only issue was negotiating the overhanging trees ...

Last weekend we held another training course at Merryhill, let by Stevie Gordon. They had a great weekend, enjoyed by all.

Looks like they made a good job of the wall, too.

Once of our members, David, was passing Balgreen yesterday and took this photo of the wall we worked on earlier this year.

It was good to see that the work has progressed on the landscaping - and, of course, that the wall was still up ...

On Saturday we had a stall at the Fife Agricultural Show at Cupar. Unlike the other shows we do (Haddington and Peebles - on the 27th of June and the 15th of August respectively this year, if you're interested in coming along) they didn't give us a pile of stone to play with, just a patch of grass between the sheep pens and the burn which flows through the site. They told us we weren't to keep the car at the site so we dutifully moved it to the car park, but some others nearby just left theirs behind their stalls. 

It was a cracking day - sunny but not too hot, with a bit of a breeze but not so much that we were constantly running after our leaflets. And after I'd moved the banner which I'd not very cleverly put across where our faces would be if we were standing in the stall we had a nice view of the sheep.

In lieu of an actual wall we had a table top mini walling kit. I built a demo wall for people to try to copy. Not my best work, but if you consider the largest stone was less than two inches long, not too terrible either. There was a shortage of hearting, so at least that was realistic.

Various people came over and had a go, a remarkable number of whom struggled to get over their preconceptions of how a wall should built - either that or there were a lot of bricklayers at the show this year. However, there were some who got the idea, including a few natural wallers who got it right without any prompting (I asked one lady who was making a very good job of the base level why she'd picked the stones she was using and she couldn't explain it more than to say, "They just seem right" - she was bang on, as well, all the same thickness, paired up so that they made the same length. Wasted in whatever it is she does, I'd say.). Most got the hang of it after a bit of help - here are a couple of the better efforts.

We had lots of interest and numerous words of support - there certainly seem to be a lot of Fifers who like dry stone walls. We didn't sell any books this time, but we had quite a few people interested in our courses and some people came over from a nearby community project ("Lucky Ewe", it's called) which might be a future project site for us.

Getting out of the show proved a bit of a nightmare as there was only one entrance/exit we could use, and the trade stands (i.e. us) had to wait to bring our vehicles in until all the livestock was moved - a process which took well over an hour. We gave up waiting and started moving the stuff out to the car by hand, which turned out to need about ten journeys back and forth carrying as much as we could lift each time. Predictably, they started letting the trade vehicles in just as we got the last of the stuff out, but at least it meant we got away smartly. If we do the show again I think we might just do as the others did and "forget" to take the car back to the car park ...

​On the way home I dropped the gazebo etc. off at our training site at Merryhill. There was a training course going on over the weekend, and by the Saturday evening they'd done a pretty good job of the bottom two-thirds or so of the wall.

And here's the finished job on Sunday afternoon, with the (rightly) proud builders (thanks to Kevin for the photo).

And it turned out my signs weren’t completely wasted as the site is a bit off the beaten track and they were useful to a couple of members who turned up who hadn’t been here before. There was a wee collapsed section next to where the training was going on, so we set to work on that.

This past Friday, Saturday and Sunday saw us revisit Threipmuir and Harlaw for another Youth Vision walling workshop and some more repairs to the walls around the reservoir.
​
(On the way to the build site I spotted a place where a cope stone had come off the wall ...

... so I put it back on again).

There was about 10m of wall needing rebuilt, suffering from the same issues that all the Threipmuir/Harlaw walls exhibit. This section was particularly bad, and we ended up having to take it right down to the ground for a lot of the length.

This done we were able to start to rebuild the wall. To begin with we had plenty of good sized stone, and were only hampered by the occasional inconveniently placed buried rock.

We came across a couple of palmate newts which had made their home in the wall. With a little encouragement they crawled into their transport to a new home nearby.

The foundation went in very nicely - almost a text book example of how to do a dry stone foundation.

The next few courses went on pretty easily as well.

And by the end of the day on Friday we'd got some bits up to through level.

On Saturday we only had two of our workshop volunteers, but a new Youth Vision recruit joined us for the day so we still had plenty of dykers. We had to hunt about a bit for stone, but the Youth Vision people helped us barrow down some from where a gap had been made in their boundary wall so we were able to continue.

And by late afternoon we were ready to put the copes on.

Some of the copes were a couple of feet long and pretty hard to deal with - you really needed three or four people to get them on to the wall. However after much perseverance, and a raiding trip to another nearby collapsed section for the last few copes, we got it completed.

And to prove it was solid, John walked along it. Maybe not quite level enough to wheel a barrow along, but not too far off.

There are still a couple of sections at Youth Vision needing done, so hopefully we can get another workshop organised to get them fixed as well.

Sunday was just a DSWA build day, and perhaps because we'd had people out the previous two days only a couple of us turned up. There were a few places near the Harlaw visitor centre (now sadly shut) which needed a bit of TLC and which could be tackled by one or two people. The most obvious was a spot where people had been climbing over, and the copes had come off.

And on closer inspection, some of the work below the copes wasn't really up to scratch either.

Once we'd stripped out the defective bits we were a bit short of stone, so we commandeered a squarish field stone. This resulted in a few of the copes being a bit high, but if this discourages people from climbing over as this point then all the better.

Once we'd climbed over the wall we could see that there were another couple of places nearby which were collapsing as well.

So we patched these up too.

There were a few other small repairs which were good for a couple of people to tackle - like this spot where a previous repair had been done, but was now failing.

Once again we needed to hunt about for stone, but once we'd found some near another previous repair we were able to put it all back a bit more neatly.

And there was even enough to fix up another wee collapse a bit further along.

After lunch we took a walk along the whole length of the wall on this side of the loch, and only found one other place in need of attention, where the stones had started to come away under the copes.

Again, once we started to look at it we found that the problem went a bit deeper than the immediately visible damage - the wall here was built like a "treble dyke" with three traced layers. We ended up taking the top few courses down and rebuilding them.

That looked like we'd done all that was pressing on this bit of wall, but while I'd been waiting around in the car park for the others (or as it turned out, other) to arrive I'd spotted a couple of places there needing attention. The biggest was too big for a couple of people to tackle (and would also need the barbed wire fence that runs along it moved and a section of the car park coned off), but there was a little collapse which we could tackle without too much difficulty.

We had to crawl under the barbed wire and negotiate some pine trees to get round to where we could work on it, but once we'd done so we could see that most of the stone was still there.

It was awkward working from only one side because of the cars and the barbed wire and the space was cramped between the trees and the wall, but we managed to get it back into shape.

There's lots more needing done here, so I expect we'll be back at some point.

​Thanks to Sam ,John and Ezra for some of the photos.

The last weekend in April saw the branch heading to Dungarthill near Dunkeld. The wall here has been worked on over several years by CSDSWA, taking down and rebuilding a very unstable wall with our host, Archie, taking time out from running his charity (which takes refurbished pick up trucks with all sorts of aid out to Ukraine) to help out. In theory this was a straight forward build, but as the dyke was bordered on one side by a burn and a fence on the other, the conditions were somewhat cramped, especially as space was needed to stack the stones from the dismantled wall.

On the Saturday seven DSWA members were rewarded with warm sunshine following the early fog. There were alpacas in the field next to the build, who were curious at to what was going on, and seemed very taken with Gordon's beard ...

On Sunday the team was reduced to five DSWA folks (four from the day before plus one new attendee). Fortunately the good weather continued and by the end of the day the section started on Saturday was completed, and there was also time to cope another section of wall.

​Archie was very happy with the work, and as what's left is a straight line and clear for building he's happy to tackle it himself, though both he and ourselves will miss our annual visits.

Thanks to Robert for the photos, and to Trish, Robert, Archie and Dave for updates.

This weekend we teamed up with the Friends of the Pentlands and Youth Vision to provide a walling workshop at Youth Vision's facility near Harlaw in the Pentland Hills Regional Park. The walls here are the same as at other points around Harlaw (see numerous previous posts) - built quickly to a half-dry-half-mortared design which is prone to collapse in on itself. This, coupled with damage caused by people climbing over the collapsed sections of the wall, is what had happened at Youth Vision. The idea of the workshop was to provide an introduction to dry stone walling for anyone interested while also repairing the damaged walls.

We were originally expecting about ten people coming along to learn on the Friday but in the end we had only four novices: these, plus five members of the branch, four FotP and four Youth Vision people meant we had seventeen volunteers working on the repairs.

There were are few sections which needed work. Youth Vision had strimmed back the briars and nettles from one collapsed section, so we started on that while some of their people worked on clearing away the other places needing work.

The issue we so often find with these walls showed itself again: when we cleared down a collapsed section, the next bit of wall along started to come down as well. The whole thing really is very fragile.

Another issue we had was lack of stone: as these walls have been built with insufficient infill ("hearting", in dry stane dyking parlance) they are partly hollow, and so rebuilding them correctly requires additional stone. We were able to "borrow" some from other nearby collapsed areas, and when one of the rangers showed up with a pickup truck we were able to drive around the reservoir and pick up more which had been left over from previous repairs. However, by the time we knocked off for lunch (delicious soup provided by Youth Vision) we'd pretty much run out of useful stone.

Lunch was in the garden of Youth Vision's 18th century cottage, which was a ruin but which is now roofed over and provides a secure workshop and space to store their equipment as well as a kitchen. There was some stone in the area around the cottage which we were able to barrow down after lunch so we were able to continue working and by the end of the day we were pretty much up to sub-cope height.

On Saturday it was blowing a gale with the wind blowing grit and bits of moss off the wall and into our eyes. None of our trainees showed up but we still had five members (two new ones, and three that had been there the day before) plus two FotP and two Youth Vision people. Our friendly ranger showed up as well with another truckload of stone, and by the end of the morning we'd got the section of wall coped and finished.

After lunch we tackled another section of wall which had started to come down. This one wasn't so bad, and the lower courses were OK to leave as they were.

And by the end of the day, we'd got this up to sub-cope level as well.

Most of us couldn't make it along on the Sunday, but Astra and AJ volunteered to come back and put the copes on.

And here's proof both of the solidity of the wall and AJ's sense of balance.

There was another collapsed wall we'd been notified of by the Pentland rangers, a few miles up the road at Harperrig. I'd been hoping to get away to have a look at it myself on Friday or Saturday but in the event had been too busy, so Astra and AJ had very kindly agreed to take a look at it on Sunday. It's a more typical dry stone wall so it doesn't have the problems that the Harlaw walls have, but when they got there they found the wall much worse for wear than the photos had showed. The wall had slid in on the inside of the field area due to water table increases and a sloped stone that everything had been sat on, with the inside a full foot or so lower than the roadside, so they had some work to clear it all.

I've emailed the rangers to ask if we can get some more stone delivered to finish off the repair. We'll be back in the vicinity again in a month or so for another workshop with Youth Vision, so hopefully we'll get both jobs done then.