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Today we went to the Ferry Glen in Queensferry to build a stone seat by the side of the walk/cycle way that runs along the route of the old dockyward railway. The Glen is admirably run and maintained by the Friends of the Ferry Glen, and they'd made ready the site and arranged for the delivery of stone and mortar (a necessary evil in such a public place).  There were only a few of us (well, two until I arrived an hour late, ably assisted by Neil from the Friends), but the mostly rectangular Alston stone we were using is quite quick to build with, so by the time Liz (also from the Friends) had shown up with some fantastic banana bread, and Neil had brought us bacon and sausage rolls for lunch (and Chris had turned up to swell our numbers) we'd got the first three courses on and had made a start on the fourth, seat-level course.  The design is similar to the bench we build at Slateford by the Water of Leith (see previous posts), but with a seat on only one side: this usually faces a waterfall but due to recent dry conditions it was hard to tell that this was the case - fortunately(?) this won't usually be true. We knocked off at about 4 with the seat back still to do - Richard and Alan are heading back tomorrow to finish it off.  And, of course, proof that it works:  UPDATE 5/9/2016: Richard, Alan and Chris returned the next day to put the back on:    And here's the finished product. Hopefully we'll be returning at some point to do some more work at Ferry Glen.    
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As I mentioned in the last post, we didn't manage to finish the culvert wall at Swanston on our last visit due to a lack of stone. So today we went back with more stone, and finished it off. Though overcast, at least today the clouds were above the hilltops - compare the below with the same shot taken the last time I was here (see post of 19th June).  Due to improvements in the Dunbar train service, I was a mere hour late - previously, if I'd taken the first train out of Dunbar on a Sunday, I'd've been three hours late ... I suppose I should be thankful for small mercies ... When I arrived work had already started on the coping (see last post for previous partially-coped state).  There was a bit of footling about to do, as we were mortaring on the cope (I know, hardly 'dry' stone, but needs must with a low wall next to a popular public path), but by lunch time we'd got it finished.   After lunch we walked up to the top culvert wall - the uphill side of this was fine, but the downhill side was much damaged, even though it had only been two months since we put it up. This is the problem with low walls beside public paths - unless the copes are huge stones, it's too easy for passers-by (and/or their dogs/children) to knock them off, and once the cope's off, the rest of the wall will soon come down.  Even though the upper wall hadn't been damaged, we decided to mortar on the copes, and after rebuilding the lower wall, we mortared its copes as well. We also anchored each end of the wall with a big stone ... these were below cope level, and needed smaller stones on top to take the wall up to the same height - it looked a bit strange, but it's a lot more secure that it was previously.  Not far from the upper culvert is the curved stone seat we built a few years back (see posts passim), which once again had become dilapidated at the ends - we suspect the local highland cattle may be to blame, for using our cheek ends as scratching posts. The solution is probably to mortar the ends on more securely (they were mortared before, but evidently not enough); however, we'd run out of mortar by this point, so we just rebuilt it for now, and hopefully it can stay up until we get a chance to go back up with some more mortar (we piled loose stones around the foot of the wall, to try to dissuade the cattle a bit).   On our way back down we found that someone had augmented our work on the first culvert wall by adding some stones to the top. I suspect some small people who had seen us building the wall on their way up the hill decided they'd like to have a go themselves on their way back down. So it would seem there is some hope for the youth of today.  A few weeks ago, a few of us built a couple of small walls above a culvert in the Pentland Hills Regional Park, on the path above Swanston village (see post of 19th June). Since then, some of us have been back and built another wall over another culvert further down the same path.  The wall's a bit bigger than the first ones - but it's a bigger culvert, as well.  There wasn't enough stone to finish the coping, but we've got some more and we're heading back next weekend to finish it off.  With thanks to Chris for the photos.
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AuthorThis blog, and the rest of the site, are produced by Donald McInnes, secretary of the East of Scotland DSWA (I'm the baldy one, sometimes in a saltire hat). Archives
July 2026
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