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.
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(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.