Wooplaw Seats and Cheek End

Last weekend we returned to Wooplaw. As I mentioned before, there's plenty there to keep us busy, so when nine of us turned up on Saturday five of us set to work on a dry stone seat, while the other four went to work on a new cheek end where the end of a wall had been demolished to improve access to the roundhouse area.

The seat was one a few they would like built along the top edge of  the valley just beyond the roundhouse. This is where the path between their two properties runs, along a line of old beach trees - there's been a wall along here in the past which has now collapsed, meaning there's plenty of stone. We'd previously propped up a flat stone next to one of the trees when discussing where to put a seat, so that seemed like a good place to start.

Some of the seat team set to work digging out the loose earth and stones while the rest went in search of large stones to build the base with, and especially flat ones for the seat area.

Meanwhile the cheek-end team went off back past the roundhouse to where the wall had been shortened. Some of the stone had been left beside the wall, though it looked like a lot of it had either been moved along to the roundhouse or used to shore up the path which runs along beside the river at this point.

We found a good big cheek end base stone further up the hill (near where we were working a month ago). It was too heavy to lift but fortunately easy enough to roll it down the hill, and by lunchtime we'd made a decent start (having salvaged some stones from the river which were too good to be used as banking support).

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The seat team had just about finished the base, with only the flat stones needing laid on top.

Wooplaw is blessed with a lot of large flat stone - good for both cheek ends and seats - so once we got back to work it didn't take long to complete the cheek end.

Some of the seat team had to leave a bit early, so we joined them and by the end of the day this was complete also.

On Sunday there were only six of us, four from the day before (including three who'd spent the night camping at the site). We decided to make another seat a bit further along from the first one, and to make it a bit different we picked a larger space and decided to dig the seat more in to the bank, and try and make it look like it was emerging from the stones already there.

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By lunchtime we'd got the seat area done, and had started on the back, which we were going to build right back in to the bank.

We sat on the first seat to eat our lunch ... useful things, dry stone seats. After lunch we finished off the 'proper' bit of the back, and then piled large stones on the top to join it back into the remains of the old wall at the top of the bank.

We've not got any more visits to Wooplaw planned for this year, but we'll be back in 2027.

Thanks to Derek and Sam for photos.