Our chairman, Richard Love, has provided this report from work done recently on a retaining wall at our training site at the Scottish Lime Centre at Merryhill in Fife - thanks also to Rosie for the photos.
​
On Sunday 28 August I picked up Alan from the bus station and we headed off to Merryhill to carry on constructing a decent length of retaining wall (revetment in Dave-speak). There were just the two of us and Alan managed to shift a few barrowloads from the shrinking pile of rounded bouldery stone down to the site of the wall, where I had cleared enough grassy bank for a good solid foundation to go in. We worked on separate sections and hoped to complete some of it on our next visit.

On Saturday 3 September  John D had to call off with a broken tooth but I was joined by Rosie, who had not worked on a retaining wall before, and we barrowed much more stone from the pile. This is getting increasingly welded together with the dried mud which accompanied the original load, so mattock and spade were needed to prise pieces apart. As you’ll see from the pictures, one section of the wall has been coped, another half-finished and a final section started by Rosie, who declared that she really enjoyed working with this stone on this wall.

My next visit there will be in two weeks for our last training course, so if anyone wishes to turn up, feel free to join us and complete the retaining wall.

Richard

Over the summer we provided demonstrations of dry stone walling at the Haddington and Peebles agricultural shows.

The day of the Haddington show started rainy, so we were glad they had provided us with some 'indoor' space alongside our building site.

The day brightened up, however, and we had a fair amount of interest in our activities.

And by the end of the day we'd managed to build a couple of meters of wall (and sold a few books and generated some interest in our courses).

The Peebles show was on one of the hottest days of one of the hottest summers on record.

The show started quietly, but the numbers built up as the day went on (as did the length of the queues at the ice-cream stalls). We benefitted from an unused gazebo set up next to our site, where people seemed happy to be able to sit in the shade for a bit and watch us work.

We didn't have so many sales at Peebles, but there were still plenty of people interested in learning the craft.