Community Project at Barley, 26th August 2023
The connection with Barley began last year when Rod and Mike came on one of our two day training courses. They were there as they wanted to rebuild the ruined wall in the Womens Institute garden in the village. The ladies of the WI use the wall to display items during their fund raising events so that explained the boards along the top. A community keen to do something itself is something we like to support so we became involved.
The ruined wall was full of bulges, sags, mortared repairs and moss covered running joints. The stone is river boulder which is very hard and tends to be short and rounded having spent a lot of time in water. Most of the branch will never have worked with this type of stone so that was another incentive to get at it. Dates were fixed, members canvassed and a complete rebuild scheduled for August 2023.
A small advanced team went to Barley on 17th August. As promised all of the wall had been taken down by Rod and his helpers in Barley. Our small team got all the old foundation out, realigned the wall and put in a new foundation ready for the subsequent rebuild.
It was a long day but very enjoyable as the stone was challenging and novel to work with.
Barley is a lovely village and being the starting point for walks up Pendle Hill there were many passers-by who stopped to watch and ask questions. Several from overseas who were amazed at the dry stone walls they had seen on their trip to these islands.
Our hosts fed and watered us wonderfully and we left at 18:00 for a lovely drive home in golden evening sunshine with lovely views over Pendle and its surrounding villages.
With every other weekend in August taken the only ‘free’ weekend to build the rest of the wall was the bank holiday weekend of the 26th&27th. I allowed two days for the work as I didn’t know how branch members would deal with the unfamiliar, challenging stone.
I needn’t have worried. By 15:00 the wall was finished, the site cleared and we were enjoying sippers at The Pendle Inn.
We had a great day in a new location with unusual stone, Barley got its new wall with a level top and Dr Kershaw’s are in receipt of £300. That’s a win, win, win in my book.
Our hosts in Barley were thrilled with their new wall which they will top in a way to enable the WI to display crafts as required. All thanks to them as they were lovely hosts.
We must have done something right for apart from building the wall, speaking to passers by all day and hopefully showcasing what we do, the chairman of the council has been in touch to ask if we would consider building another wall of 30m near by.
Chris Bolshaw