wooplaw roundhouse and new circular route

Earlier in the year we heard that the dry stone roundhouse at Wooplaw Community Woodland had been burnt down. This had been built back in 1992 or thereabouts with help from the Scottish Woodlands Trust, and it originally had a thatched roof. I don't think the DSWA was involved with the original project, but they must have had at least one experienced dyker working on it as the walls were properly built with well structured cheek ends on either side of the entrance, and it wasn't surprising that it had stood for over 30 years until it got vandalised.

When we got there last weekend it was dry with some sunshine, and enough of a breeze to keep the midges at bay. The Wooplaw folks had already removed the burnt timbers, and most of the stone was still in place with only one bit of wall badly collapsed. As this was in a better place for the entrance this seemed like a good opportunity to move it.

We found one inhabitant who had decided to stay on despite the fire ...

And also an old Irn Bru bottle embedded in the wall.

It contained some coins and a receipt from the Galashiels Co-op for 20 Embassy cigarettes. Sadly, the water had got in so the date (and the price of 20 fags 30+ years ago) wasn't legible. The coins had been bent to get them into the bottle, so the dates on them weren't readable either.

The stone at Wooplaw is hard greywacke. It tends to be irregular in shape, and it doesn't take well to being hammered - you're more likely to end up with a split right down the middle if you try anything more than minimal shaping. There were some good long pieces, though, which is what you need for cheek ends.

We had a pretty good turnout on the Saturday (nine DSWA members plus a couple of people from Wooplaw), which was too many to work on the roundhouse, but there are lots of walls at Wooplaw so we weren't short of things to do. The woodsmen had found it necessary to knock down a bit of the wall beside the path down to the roundhouse to get their mini tractor in, and they wanted to keep this gap and open up another one opposite to allow for a new circular walk taking in part of the wood which wasn't getting used. They'd marked the route for us in orange paint ...

Sorting this out meant four more cheek ends, so it was good that we had lots of long stone. We had lots of stone generally, in fact, as there was not only the contents of the now demolished sections of wall but there also turned out to be an old stone dump right next to the first cheek end we did (there are several of these dotted about Wooplaw).

There was an ash tree suffering from die-back next to where the last of the cheek ends needed to go which had to come down. It would've been difficult for the tree fellers to work around a newly built wall, and as it was getting late anyway we just cleared away some space around it for them to do their work later that evening.

Meanwhile down at the roundhouse the new doorway was taking shape nicely.

The next day was wetter but still with enough wind to keep the midges away. We were pleased to see that they'd managed to take the tree down without taking any of the wall with it.

I think our cheek ends steadily improved over the weekend, though they all felt pretty solid.

We didn't have so many people on the Sunday (five of the DSWA from the day before plus one new member, plus the two Wooplaw volunteers again) so once we'd done the last of the path cheek ends we all went down to work on the roundhouse. We decided to build a small seat into the inside of the wall where the original entrance had been, so we took down the original cheek ends to allow this to be built properly into the wall.

I didn't have a business card to add to the Irn Bru bottle, but we used a ticket from last week's show (with the show date printed on it) with a note on the back saying "Rebuilt by Wooplaw Community Woodland and East of Scotland DSWA" and the date. The most recent coin we could muster was a 2015 5p piece, so (after a bit of bending) that went in as well.

We built the bottle back into the wall beside the new seat.

We were running a bit sort of stone by the afternoon, so one of the Wooplaw volunteers came with the mini tractor and moved some of the spare stone from the path down for us, and by the end of the day we'd got most of the wall built up.

We'll be back in a couple of weeks to finish off the roundhouse and tackle some of the other projects they have - there's a badger hide which needs some attention, I'm told ...

Thanks to Sam and John for photos, and to Wooplaw for having us, and of course especially to all the volunteers who came along to help out.