Harlaw and Harperrig

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.

They stripped the wall down to the bottom and rebuilt the foundation course solid. Once again they were short of stone, but when they were finished they were only just shy by a couple of courses to cope level.

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.