Ropey

Backblip
Another ropey start to the day! This time, unlike yesterday, we managed to get up in time, but as we drove towards the site, I "missed" a bit of the road on a sharp bend, and we acquired a puncture.
It's when you are in one of the most inaccessible parts of Scotland, on a single-track road and with no mobile phone signal, that you discover that car hire companies no longer provide a spare wheel. They do have a complicated pump system to deliver fast-setting foam into the tyre, but it doesn't work when part of the local geology has cut a 3 cm gash in the sidewall.
In the end, we found a spot up a hill where if you stand on one leg and stick your elbow in your ear, it's possible to get one bar of signal on the phone...J-P came out from site to rescue us and we got the tyre changed eventually...
The photo is of the rope access team, drilling into the living bedrock on which the castle stands. You can see that the rock is formed of blocks with vertical fissures...some of the blocks are being eroded from below and could fall into the sea, taking the 3 m thick 13th century walls of the castle with them. These guys have drilled out cores from around the bedrock, now they are drilling holes, pushing in steel rods and bolts, gluing the core back in on top and hopefully creating an invisible mend that will keep the stone where it is for the next few hundred years.
They are amazingly skilled, strong and quite mad. Great guys :)
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