Threepmuir workshop 3

Last Friday and Saturday we were back at Threepmuir for another walling workshop with Youth Vision. On the way there Sam and I popped in to the Ravelrig Riding for the Disabled stables nearby. They've just acquired a field with a big dry stone wall in it, the rebuilding of which will hopefully feature in future blogs. There's quite a bit of it, in various states of repair ...

We got to the car park for Threepmuir a bit early, so while I was waiting for the Youth Vision people to arrive I had a look at the walls. There was one place where the copes were starting to come off ...

So I put them back on again.

Stitch in time, and all that ... there are plenty of other bits around the car park needing attention, but the Youth Vision people showed up just as I was getting the last couple of copes above on so they'll need to wait for another day.

​Friday's workshop wasn't so well attended as the previous ones - we only had one workshopee (if that's a word) and three DSWA volunteers; however, four of the Youth Vision people came and helped out too, so we felt we had enough to tackle the next-biggest section of collapsed wall.

When we got the wall stripped down it was obvious what the main problem was - the roots of the nearby trees had moved the foundations of the wall considerably, and most of the base stones were no longer anything like level. We needed a big pinch bar to get the biggest of them out.

Once we'd got it all dug out, and had been reinvigorated by crumpets with Youth Vision's own elder berry jam and Tim's excellent coffee, we started putting the foundations back in.

The bits of wall either side of where we were working were in a pretty bad way - one end in particular was about a foot off the original line (though still staying up due to the masses of mortar that had been put in), so we decided to just build our own section, and tie it in to the existing wall if we had time the next day. By lunchtime (delicious soup, made using coriander which was grown a few yards from where we were eating it) we'd got the first couple of courses up.

And by the end of the day we'd got the throughs on.

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The next day my car got a flat tyre (fortunately only a few hundred yards or so from the house, and even more fortunately close to the garage where I go to get my car fixed, though they aren't open on Saturdays). This meant taking public transport to the southern edge of Edinburgh and hiking up to the site, so a one-hour drive became a three-hour bus/walk, and it was lunchtime before we arrived. There were three other DSWA people there though, plus a couple from Youth Vision, and they'd got our bit of wall from the day before up to sub-cope height, and were working on joining it on to the rest of the wall. Sadly, this meant more digging out of root-toppled foundations.

Of course, as is the way of this wall, once we started taking down the bits at the end more came down, which wasn't helped by a yard-long section of copes which were mortared solidly to each other and the stones beneath. Once we'd got this down the gap looked considerably bigger than it had when we'd started, and it was getting obvious that we would have neither enough time nor enough stone to finish the job that day.

We did as much as we could, and Youth Vision will talk to the park rangers to get some more stone delivered, and then we can arrange another visit to get the work finished.

Thanks to everyone who came along to help out and to Youth Vision for their ever-excellent hospitality, and to Sam for photos.