Hauling stanes

This is what greets us as we open the back door this morning on this glorious spring morning.

Our wonderful neighbour, Innes has given us the use of his "teleshifter" to move this stone up and over the fence. We only have to barrow the stone from the side of the house to the bucket of this big machine. Even so, it's not an easy job as you can see by the size of the stone.

We are getting a dry stane dyke (stone wall for you US folk) built here at Whitelees. The man coming to build it, doesn't know when he'll be here, so we've got to be ready at any time.

Being ready means that all the stone ("stane" in Scots) that has been stored on the east side of the house, has to be moved to the site where the stone wall will be.

This is the stone pile on the side of the house where it has been kept until we were ready to use it. You can see that the stones that are in this pile are mostly normal sized ones. The Man of the Place and I moved all the biggest ones last night. You can see the big ones in the bucket of the teleshifter in the first photo. Innes will be around later and dump them over the fence for us. I hope Henry's back is okay this morning. Mine seems to be fine.

This is where the stone wall is going to be built. From in front of that beech tree towards the mailbox. You can just see the growing pile of stone on the other side of the fence. The US style mailbox was a gift from my husband to make me feel a bit more at home here in Scotland. I've also noticed that you can see how the leaves are popping out. We've had almost a whole week of sunny warm weather. The near permanent puddles that live in our drive near the mailbox are gone!