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.