Peebles Show 2026

On Saturday the 15th of August we went to the Peebles Agricultural Show to provide our usual demonstration of dry stone walling. As ever, they'd given us a big pile of greywacke to play with - even bigger than usual this time, which may be because they've asked us to make a couple of stone pillars for them at a new pedestrian entrance at some future date. We'd arranged with the show organiser that he'd pop by to discuss what we could do at some point during the day.

We set up our table in front of the stone pile with our books and leaflets and our table-top mini walling set.

And set about building a wall.

We had a really busy day with lots of people stopping to talk about all things wall or have a go with the mini walling kit. We had a clear winner, who managed six course wall.

We were so busy that I didn't get a chance to do much walling or check out the other things at the show. We could see the motorcycle stunt riders though, when they popped up over the tents doing their acrobatic jumps. Mid afternoon it started to quieten down a bit and most of our wallers left, so I decided I'd have a go at doing some building myself. I got some help from a few passers-by, including one family who pretty much all had a go. Not as good as the 'proper' wall, but not too bad either.

In the end the show organiser didn't show up - I phoned and left a message for him, but he didn't get back to me. Perhaps not too surprising as he's probably the busiest guy in Peebles on show day. Hopefully he'll get back in touch at some point.

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