Bearsden

This shows the gable I have been working on with the cement removed, stone repaired and then repointed in lime. (See below for before) Some of the upright joints between the cant stones of the chimney flue - the large square stones set on their sides - had decayed arises - the corners of the blocks - leaving soft edges and insides. I had to cut them back and rebuild between them with stone and mortar. These thicker areas are still drying out, but even so, the stone already looks healthier than it did when the cement was rotting it. One stone under the cement render was no harder than a sandcastle. To remove it, I cut it in half with my finger and brushed it out.

Bearsden

A wooded burn separates Bearsden and Drumchapel. Its a tangle of scrub, slightly wild but slightly squalid. As I rode through today, a deer looked up from grazing and eyed me without concern. The wood is a small wild space and the community could feel attached to but it doesn't look it. Barring the odd dog walker, it looks more like an ignored space. Dirty rubbish sits among the trees and a new fence and hedge sits between it and some new houses on the Bearsden side. The hedge has blocks of beech and hawthorn and will eventually obscure the burn for the people in the houses. That people largely avoid it sounds regrettable but perhaps its actually for the best. I'd like to think that people and wildlife have shared the same spaces for ten thousand years in this country and could do so here as well but, since we continually tidy nature out of our urban environment, perhaps its good that vaguely unappealing places like this exist as it means that the deer and other creatures can go about their business untroubled.

I go past here on the days that I don't have to take the car, on my way to do some repairs on a Victorian house in Bearsden. I am taking cement out and putting lime mortar back in and doing some repairs on decayed stone. This is a before picture:

Penicuik House

I went to Penicuik House this week. The remains of the big house, and it is huge, are being conserved following a fire in the late nineteenth century. For a house that has stood as a ruin for over a century, its in remarkably good shape. The locality is beautiful and even the graffiti has something pleasantly historical about it.

The beechwoods there, beside the Pentland Hills, are superb, as are the house grounds which are open to the public. But I wasn't there just to enjoy the woods and the grounds. I went to learn some extra skills with the Scottish Lime Centre who, while based in Fife, also have a training centre there. It allows people like me to learn at the feet of the craftspeople who can repair traditional buildings, ie pre-1914, to the highest standards. If a little bit rubs off on us then the buildings will be better placed to face the elements for another hundred years and the folk who live in them will be saved considerable sums of money. Repairs with the widely available materials that most builders use cause medium and long term harm that is costly to fix. Cement pointing on traditional masonry can rot stone quickly and subsequent repairs in cement to the crumbling stone can only compound the problem. However it's not all doom and gloom. Repairs can be done well and one of the many things we learned this week was replicating masons tooling to match surrounding work.

Glasgow

I just finished repointing the most needy parts on a house in one of Glasgow's Conservation Areas. I used a lime mortar appropriate to the wall type on this building. Cement mortar would have been inappropriate. In short it can be lead to disaster on pre-1914 buildings because it causes damp and stone rot. And yet you see it everywhere.

Next week I am going on a course to learn skills to make surface stone repairs that match original work, unlike the one hidden beneath the masonry paint in this picture.

Shandon

I just finished a retaining wall in Shandon. The original was built in stone and lime sometime in the late nineteenth century when alterations were made to the house. I know this because mouldings from a chimney stack the like of which are still on the house were among the rubble behind the wall. It was blackened inside so was on the house for a while. I suppose it must have been removed when a new wing was added.

Anyway, that's all very interesting but my real point is something else. This repair and others similar that I have done in the last few years make me realise that drystone doesn't just look nice. It can also be the cheapest and most sensible way to make a repair. Other quotes on this job advocated a wall behind of breeze block and mortar with a front of mortared stone. In other words, two walls with associated drainage to stop water pushing them over and much labour at much cost. Drystone can be more cost effective than a block wall with stone veneer to retain a bank. It is free draining so there is less labour and no future trouble on that count, there is only one wall required so there is less labour on that count, and there is no mortar so its a greener option to boot as enormous amounts of energy are used to make cement. What's more, if ever you need to move it to extend the house you won't need a JCB to pull it out, you can take it apart by hand and rebuild on the new line.

Built right it will retain any bank, even a very tall one,
such as this one of 7 feet that I built in Gartocharn. Its predecessor was a double wall of breeze block with a stone veneer in front that collapsed after only 20 years, swept away by a build up of water one wet autumn a few years ago. The one before that apparently fell down too. I don't know why that one fell, but some poor building along with the water build up did for the one I saw. It seems to me that freedraining drystone was always the best solution to retain this bank. I thought the structural engineer that I built this one for was pushing its ability to transfer weight too far when he built a deck and timber summer house on top but he was, and two years later still is, unconcerned.

Shandon

Before and after shots for a repair in Shandon. This retaining wall had collapsed a short time ago. Narrow stones placed poorly on sloping bedrock at the base and two or three budlia growing on top made it fall. I cut more bedrock out, with an axe of all things, and laid the base stones across the wall to give more stability. It is part of the boundary wall of the kitchen garden for one of the big old houses cut into the hillside at Shandon. Eight gardeners once tended the stuff destined for the table of the big house on the other side of the burn. There are few vegetables at the moment but the vegetation is so luxuriant that at least one entire glass house lay concealed and I only ever saw one corner of the garden. Although it is not large, I still have no idea of its extent.

Barrhead

Repairs and reshaping to the drive meant this drystone retaining wall in Barrhead had to be pushed back into the bank. We took the wall down and cut the bank back. This is the after shot with the wall rebuilt. You can see the original line where the monoblock is crooked. The slope is steep though it may not look too bad in this picture We cut steps into it and ran the stone courses in horizontally. This should have been easy enough, but the last few weeks have been very wet and the slope was a mud slide.

Bearsden

Here are some sort of before and after shots for a job I did in Bearsden recently. The gardens climb steeply here onto a fairly high ridge covered in mature trees. The school at one end of the ridge down in Drumchapel is called Drummore and preserves the Gaelic name for the feature. The wall was built high up, where the long garden met the woods and getting the stone up was exhausting. I am glad that part at least is over. Its not far from Garscadden wood nature reserve and I think it is surrounded in a way by houses so it's a wildlife haven on the edge of the city. Two weeks ago I heard and then glimpsed a raven above the trees. It was a pleasant surprise but it must have been a visitor because I haven't seen or heard it since.

Killcreggan

I finished the stretches of dyke in Kilcreggan. As is often the case, I ran short of stone and had to borrow from the heaps around the gardens. Although the original wall tipped over, it was built with much skill. The facing was tight and, for a wall of such height and narrowness, it is standing well. In fact it is narrower at the base than many walls only two thirds its height and this is maybe part of its problem. But not all. The hearting is a bit sparse inside and, now a century has passed, it has settled and migrated down a bit . This is why we often run short of stone. The guys, like most workers back in the day, were paid low rates by the yard and chucked the hearting in to build the walls up fast and thicken their paypacket. As with most jobs, the rate of pay is fairer now and so we build walls with stouter hearts, at least we should. And building them tighter like this uses more stone. Despite all this, those men built a good wall that is, barr the odd repair, still standing straight and true long after they passed.

Kilcreggan

I am repairing an old dyke that marks the bounds between two houses in Kilcreggan. One is modern but the other, like so many houses in the village, is a piece of Victorian grandeur in minature with things like sculpted stone window details and ornamented wooden eaves.


It's almost 40 miles by road for me so last night I camped on an old jetty near the village. The jetty is two parallel mortared dykes with boulders between. Its long since tackety boots crunched on the stone and it now wears a coat of turf where clusters of pink thrift and sea campion dance in the wind. As darkness fell a riotous assembly of pipestrelle bats gathered giving wild chase to each other. Try as I might I could not hear their flight, even when they performed quick fire swoops and dives but two feet away.

Kilpatrick hills

I went over the hill from Glasgow today to fix a wire on a dyke I repaired a few months ago. The rain was driving in hard and Jim the farmer wanted a better day so we postponed. I had a dyke repair in Kilcreggan to see but not until afternoon. That left me free for a while so I walked up the hill to the Whangie.

The story goes that The Devil was in Strathblane but had an appointment with another soul in Dumbarton. For a shortcut he leapt the hill. On the way over his tail whanged the hillside and sliced it open. A huge segment of cliff peeled away and settled a few feet forward leaving a deep gorge immediately behind. We live in more secular times and it is now a popular spot with walkers and climbers. A well worn path winds its way up the hill and I passed a school party coming down. The rain had by now eased off and, as we passed, I saw that they didn't look quite so bedraggled as I expected given the squall they had been caught in.

A pair of ravens were the only company at the top. They must have a nest on the cliff and, as I picked my way through the gorge, they glided the wind above whilst giving me what-for in throaty voices gruff as Lily Savage.

Cardross Seminary

Just outside Cardross is an architectural wonder. Here, in the middle of the woods, lie the ruins of a seminary built in the 1960s. Elevated walkways - streets in the sky - wrap the largest building while rows of cells run its length each side. A curved ceiling of concrete around wire mesh gives each cell the feeling of a cocoon. On four floors, all but those on the upper floor open onto a single wide space occupying the centre of the building.

Other buildings have curved outside walls with beautiful random arrangements of rectangular windows and panelled ceilings that begin horizontally in the usual fashion before sweeping upward in a smooth curve to finish in the vertical. Edgar a' Chuimreach chuimseach told me that it was beset with problems, leaky flat roofs and so on. It's a pity the designers shot themselves in the foot and compromised the building by inattention to such crucial detail.

It has been closed since the early 1980s and much vandalised since. The woods are encroaching and the buildings now poke out from among the trees. The buildings look solidly urban and to see them among woods like this gives the place a post-apocalyptic and dangerous feel, like the order of things has collapsed and anything might happen in here. Looking at the damage from countless fires I think the neds felt the same. We didn't meet any on our trip but I fear that we, a couple of drystane dykers shambling in after work, probably added to rather than detracted from the Planet-of-the-Apes feel that the place has.

Hadrians wall

I took a train to Carlisle on Friday then went a bit further upland and inland to the Birdoswald centre on Hadrian's wall. It is a fairly grand courtyard farm that was built inside a Roman fort and, much more recently, converted into a visitor and study centre. Here, a number of other drystone wallers and I took a few steps toward becoming instructors. I also took a few steps along the wall and around the fort this morning. The cold wind that blew all Saturday was gone leaving a pleasant and warm day. The rough block of the Roman masonry was regimented into long lines unbroken by risers (those stones that rise above the line of a course), like a long string of words without a breath. Its quicker to build with block so perhaps I am being a bit unkind. This was a frontier after all, with a huge workforce of soldier-masons erecting forts of standard buildings. Like the buildings of burger chains, they were substantially similar across continents, visible signs of some external but enormous power.

Baille Ubhail

Most of the stone in the walls at Baille Ubhail comes from the fields. Iona and Jack collect it all, if not from their own bit then from a nearby christmas tree plantation. There is barely a stone pokes through the ground that its not snapped up. I have been here on and off for the past three years building things like this curve into the driveway. Another load of stone is ready so I am back to do a bit more. This is a good time of year to return because wild watercress, biolair, grows in a ditch nearby.

Rutherglen

A friend and I drove out to Rutherglen this evening to collect some tools from inside a building on the Main Street. A while ago, lets say about 1800, masons altered a fireplace inside that building. They made it narrower using stone salvaged from elsewhere and one of the blocks had a bit of carving on it. The masons saw the carving and recognised the hand of a sculptor. Nonetheless they cut a small notch in it that would hold a dook, a short wooden peg about 2 inches thick, and laid the stone. The dook was one of many on that wall used by the joiners who came in to attach internal fittings. They built up the fire surround and nailed on wooden battens to hold lath and plaster. Once the fire surround was in, and the plasterer was finished, the carved stone was hidden from view - even when the fireplace was blocked up in the 1970s.

By 1800 the sculpture was already approaching a thousand years old because that block of stone was part of an early medieval cross. What happened before 1800 is a mystery. Perhaps it had been used in a building that was demolished around that time. In it's latest home beside the fireplace, the stone lay forgotten until the interior of the pub was stripped out to bare walls and earthen floor. It was at this point that Dave, the friend in the car with me, working inside the building for Archaeological Heritage Services Ltd (this is their picture) spotted it and academics recognised its antiquity. Their knowledge restored a little of the stone's memory.

Tayvallich

Found this drystone bridge in Gleann Saobhail above Tayvallich. Long boulders have been lowered from each bank onto a drystone buttress built midstream. Just crossing it is an act of derring-do. The picture below shows one half.
















There is an old clachan nearby. We could see the ruined gables of the houses across the glen but didn't visit as we were bound for the loch and a spot of fishing. Further up, at the loch, the sides of the glen were steep with thin woodland of birch and hazel on slopes strewn with boulders and crags. A golden eagle hunted the slope beside us, gliding down the glen in wide circles. Apparently golden eagles reacted aggressively to aircraft in the early days of flying. There are stories of eagles ripping into the fuselage of the first delicate planes. So much so that the French military considered training them, while the British issued instructions to their pilots on how to deal with it. Did these eagles realise that they were about to lose their pre-eminence and attack the planes in a fit of jealousy? I doubt it, but I like the idea. Back at the loch, we caught nothing but didn't care. We had a campsite with a view of Jura and a ceilidh by the fire to look forward to.

Taigh Chombaich

The masons here in the nineteenth century used sand from the loch or spits beside burns mixed with lime for their mortar. We are close to slate outcrops so the sand is pebbly with small discs of slate. Its coarse of texture but perfect for using with lime. We are taking down those parts of the walls that trees are pushing over. To clear out old mortar, easiest is to tap it with a hammer and sweep out the grit.

Today we stripped out a length of wall with a double problem. A mature sycamore was heaving it over and a small tree was rooted on the cope sending a thick taproot through the masonry into the ground. As we cut it out I totted up 30 + rings. Edgar A' Chuimreach chuimseach thought it might be elm. If so then we reflected that it was seeded when stories of Dutch Elm disease in England filled the airwaves. With the disease still spreading through Scotland we wished that this elm had been luckier.

With the tree out I was tapping at the mortar when, between hammer blows, three newts appeared. I stopped and scooped them up. I know that they play possum, striking angular poses as if dead, but I had just been hitting the place where they emerged with a hammer so they might have been. One darted off my palm and fell to the ground so I knew it was OK. Another wriggled so it was fine too, but the third one didn't move. I looked in his eye to see if it were clouding over but it might just have been too soon. Even when I burrowed into the heap of leaves against the far side of the wall and placed them in the cool hollow I didn't know whether or not number three was still playing particularly good possum.

They were Palmate newts, Arc-luachrach bheag, pretty dinky fellows. I didn't have my camera but I borrowed this picture from http://rxwildlife.org.uk. With the rich moss growing on the wall, it could easily have been taken today.

Greigh Chille Mhanachan

I took these photos recently of walls I repaired last autumn.




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This tall dyke was slightly unusual, round here anyway. It was capped with great boulders used as coverstones and sweetened off with smaller shards of stone and lime. Putting great weight on the wall like this worked extremely well. It was over 100 years old, 5'6 tall and in great condition. This was the only part to collapse. The fallen stone was buried beneath about a foot of rich woodland soil, a corner poking from the ground here and there. In fact, when I started digging, I was not sure the stone was still there. This all suggests that it fell shortly after completion. It was easy to see why. The boulders here were just too ambitious, too heavy for me to lift five feet anyway, and brought the wall down. I put them in lower down and finished the wall with a cope of more modest boulders.

There are plenty ponies on this farm. And that means plenty mushrooms growing on heaps of well rotted manure. There were boletes from the woods as well and I made lots of soup as the fungi fruited over the weeks. We had family up from Cornwall at the time and Aunt Gabrielle was particularly fond of it. Thinking back, I am not sure if I ever did confess that the secret of the sauce was from the horse.

St Kessogs

I went back to visit St Kessogs to take some 'after' photos. Here is one. It's counterpart is below.


www.elanddrystone.co.uk

Taigh Chombaich

I am part of a small team assembled to repair the worst parts of old estate walls. From small holes like this:

before

after

To longer stretches like this:
















We have been here a few weeks now but about a month ago saw a v-shaped skein of large geese more than 50 strong flying and honking overhead. With a sudden shift in perspective we realised that they were not geese at all but swans. My knowledge of such like is thin, but Edgar a' Chuimreach chuimseach thought they were likely Bewick swan, once called Eala bheag in these parts, returning to Siberia for the summer.

Greigh Chille Mhanachan

One icy morning this January a car slid off the road and through the dyke - right beside that telegraph pole. It was not the first such incident here. Buried six inches in the mud at the same spot were the dials of a motorbike held together like enormous specacles on a rusty bow of iron. 20 some metres of dyke were in a sorry state from these and other accidents.


It's wet. The wettest part of the field.





But the company is good.These Dales ponies stayed away from me for most of the day. It was a day with some nasty wintry squalls so I was head down, hood up and hat pulled low. I didn't hear them when they eventually came late in the afternoon. How long she was there I don't know but she slowly pushed her head forward until it was on my shoulder. I still didn't notice her so she gave a big snort. Nearly gave me a bloody heart attack.

Coming back here gave me the chance to take some pictures of work I did at the end of last summer. I will put them up later.

St Kessogs

St. Andrew was not always the patron saint of Scotland. Somehow his followers ousted St. Kessog. Quite how such a thing is achieved is rather hard to imagine and, given that soldiers invoked the incumbent's name as they charged into battle, I suspect the champions of the new saint needed all their wits to pull it off.

Kessog was an Irishman who came to Scotland. His name is attached to Loch Lomond where he is associated with a monastic house on an island whose name says exactly that, Innis Taigh a'Mhanaich. He was killed in an armed skirmish not far away at Bandraidh. Here at St Kessogs I am just finishing the dykes. So far as I or anyone I speak to knows, the site of any chapel around here is long forgotten. But the name lingers. The cottage is a couple of hundred years old and older still is a medieval font built into one of the walls that was found a few years ago when a new door was put in.

St. Kessogs

This dyke is slowly dissolving. The bit without moss shows where a collapsed section has been cobbled back together but the whole thing is all over the place, swaying about like an old drunk. Bill Farmer tells me it is only about 35 years old so I suspect that it has little hearting inside to hold it up. In other words, it's hollow.

I took this picture and went down to visit Bill on the farm. I was riding a bike and a small crowd of birds feeding on the ground fled as I turned into the track. A panicked woodpidgeon crashed straight into a wire fence. He paused a moment, struggled over and dashed off leaving a couple of feathers behind. I went on. There was nobody on the farm so I loitered for half an hour and left. On the return and about half a mile away I bumped into Iain Mor. As we stood passing the time of day an odd sequence of noises came from inside a fir tree nearby. A grey creature was tumbling from branch to branch. I thought it was just a squirrel so when it hit the ground I ignored it but Iain Mor went to look. He emerged holding a woodpidgeon. At first it seemed fine and we were puzzled, something was wrong. It flapped sluggishly and its feet were curled up under its belly. Looking closely, the perfect shell of feathers was cracked. There was hole in the feathers on the back of its head. It occured to me then that this was the bird who collided with the fence and that the collision was more serious than it looked.