Threipmuir and Harlaw revisited

This past Friday, Saturday and Sunday saw us revisit Threipmuir and Harlaw for another Youth Vision walling workshop and some more repairs to the walls around the reservoir.
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(On the way to the build site I spotted a place where a cope stone had come off the wall ...

... so I put it back on again).

Once again the Friends of the Pentlands were on hand to help with the workshop, and once again Youth Vision had strimmed the site for us so we didn't have to fight our way through brambles and nettles. We didn't have quite as many as last time - three each from FotP, DSWA and workshop volunteers, plus a few of the Youth Vision people popped over to help out from time to time. The bit of wall we were repairing this time had been down for quite a while, judging by the amount of pine needles that had accumulated in it.

There was about 10m of wall needing rebuilt, suffering from the same issues that all the Threipmuir/Harlaw walls exhibit. This section was particularly bad, and we ended up having to take it right down to the ground for a lot of the length.

This done we were able to start to rebuild the wall. To begin with we had plenty of good sized stone, and were only hampered by the occasional inconveniently placed buried rock.

We came across a couple of palmate newts which had made their home in the wall. With a little encouragement they crawled into their transport to a new home nearby.

The foundation went in very nicely - almost a text book example of how to do a dry stone foundation.

The next few courses went on pretty easily as well.

And by the end of the day on Friday we'd got some bits up to through level.

On Saturday we only had two of our workshop volunteers, but a new Youth Vision recruit joined us for the day so we still had plenty of dykers. We had to hunt about a bit for stone, but the Youth Vision people helped us barrow down some from where a gap had been made in their boundary wall so we were able to continue.

And by late afternoon we were ready to put the copes on.

Some of the copes were a couple of feet long and pretty hard to deal with - you really needed three or four people to get them on to the wall. However after much perseverance, and a raiding trip to another nearby collapsed section for the last few copes, we got it completed.

And to prove it was solid, John walked along it. Maybe not quite level enough to wheel a barrow along, but not too far off.

There are still a couple of sections at Youth Vision needing done, so hopefully we can get another workshop organised to get them fixed as well.

Sunday was just a DSWA build day, and perhaps because we'd had people out the previous two days only a couple of us turned up. There were a few places near the Harlaw visitor centre (now sadly shut) which needed a bit of TLC and which could be tackled by one or two people. The most obvious was a spot where people had been climbing over, and the copes had come off.

And on closer inspection, some of the work below the copes wasn't really up to scratch either.

Once we'd stripped out the defective bits we were a bit short of stone, so we commandeered a squarish field stone. This resulted in a few of the copes being a bit high, but if this discourages people from climbing over as this point then all the better.

Once we'd climbed over the wall we could see that there were another couple of places nearby which were collapsing as well.

So we patched these up too.

There were a few other small repairs which were good for a couple of people to tackle - like this spot where a previous repair had been done, but was now failing.

Once again we needed to hunt about for stone, but once we'd found some near another previous repair we were able to put it all back a bit more neatly.

And there was even enough to fix up another wee collapse a bit further along.

After lunch we took a walk along the whole length of the wall on this side of the loch, and only found one other place in need of attention, where the stones had started to come away under the copes.

Again, once we started to look at it we found that the problem went a bit deeper than the immediately visible damage - the wall here was built like a "treble dyke" with three traced layers. We ended up taking the top few courses down and rebuilding them.

That looked like we'd done all that was pressing on this bit of wall, but while I'd been waiting around in the car park for the others (or as it turned out, other) to arrive I'd spotted a couple of places there needing attention. The biggest was too big for a couple of people to tackle (and would also need the barbed wire fence that runs along it moved and a section of the car park coned off), but there was a little collapse which we could tackle without too much difficulty.

We had to crawl under the barbed wire and negotiate some pine trees to get round to where we could work on it, but once we'd done so we could see that most of the stone was still there.

It was awkward working from only one side because of the cars and the barbed wire and the space was cramped between the trees and the wall, but we managed to get it back into shape.

There's lots more needing done here, so I expect we'll be back at some point.

​Thanks to Sam ,John and Ezra for some of the photos.