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.




o







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.