Harlaw wall repairs

Last weekend we returned to Harlaw in the Pentlands to work on the walls there, once again aided by the Friends of the Pentlands. There were two sections needing attention, both of which had been deliberately pushed down - the first by vandals, and the second by a concerned Friend who realised that the wall was in danger of collapse. Saturday morning was bright and fair - almost too hot in the sun - and we had enough people (five of us and five Friends) to make a start on both sections. I failed to get a 'before' photo of the vandalised section, but here's how the other one looked before we started.

Note the big chunk of mortared-together copes on the middle of the heap of collapsed wall - this is part of the problem here, where the wall below the copes settles and comes away because the copes (being mortared together) can't settle with it. This isn't helped by the stone being traced (so, with the long dimension running along the wall rather than in to it) and the wall being largely hollow. Pretty much all of the wall along this side of the loch is leaning precariously and in danger of collapse.

We also had to deal with a barbed wire fence which had been erected along the field side of the wall, but once we'd got this rolled back we were able to clear the collapsed stone from the wall. We decided to push the next section down as well, as it was so close to collapse. The bit after that wasn't any too stable either, but we decided to leave that up for the time being at least as most of this wall is in a bad way, and there's a limit to what can be achieved in a weekend.

Mid morning Sam took a wander along to the vandalised section to see how the other team were getting on, and like us they'd had to take down more of the wall than had originally been damaged but had made good progress and were beginning to build the wall back up again.

Another couple of DSWA members joined us later in the morning, having got confused about where we were working and gone to Threepmuir, but had spotted our hi-viz vests and so had managed to find us. By lunchtime we'd got the collapsed section rebuilt up to sub-cope height, but we hadn't joined it on to the existing wall due to the poor state it was in and how far it was leaning over.

Team vandalised had been getting on well also, and were over half way back up.

After lunch it didn't take long to cope the section we'd done, so we decided to take down the next bit and rebuild that also.

Perhaps needless to say more of it came down than we'd anticipated, and pretty soon we had a section almost as big as the original gap to deal with.

Still, many hands make light work, and with eight of us working on it by the end of the day we'd got most of it back up to through height.

Team vandalism had also got lots done, and had only had to leave a short section when they ran out of stone.

We bumped into one of the rangers on our way out, and she said she'd get the next day's ranger to meet us first thing so we could go and collect more stone.

The next day wasn't so bright and sunny, but a couple of us plus four Friends of the Pentlands braved the rain to head out and complete the work. Our ranger had proved better than her word and had already got a truck load of stone delivered to the vandalised site, and it didn't take us long to get it done.

We wheelbarrowed some of the stone round to the other site and were planning to return for the rest, but we bumped into the duty ranger and he agreed to bring it round for us in his truck - which proved just as well as my garden-strength barrow had proved not up to the job, and wouldn't've survived another run. The ranger very kindly also agreed to take a few of us up to the place where we were getting the stone from to get some more, and in the end did two more runs which gave us plenty to be getting on with, and by late morning we'd got the section we'd taken down the day before back up.

This left the small gap at the other end of the repair we'd done on Saturday. The problem with this was that the existing wall was leaning very precariously, which was both unsafe and also difficult (almost impossible) to build up to.

So we gave it a shove, and down it came.

The rain had gone off a bit by this time, but as soon as it stopped the midges came out in force. There was a bit of a breeze down by the loch which kept them away, so we had our lunch there. After lunch we dug out the new gap to foundation level:​

and built it back up properly.

We were a bit surprised that we'd managed to get it completed, especially after so much had come down at the last shove: having chunky stone feels like hard work at the time, but it does get the wall back up quickly, so that had helped. We'll hopefully be back in the vicinity soon to finish off the wall at Threepmuir.

Thanks to everyone who came along to help out, and to Sam for photos.