If you took our table tops, please bring them back!

Happier day...as well as the carvings, the work included three table tops for the fairy dell in Castlebank but two of them have been stolen today (Picture by Sarah Peters)

Following the theft of newly-planted bushes and trees only days ago, they were literally left standing by the theft today of two large wooden discs intended as table tops for the storyteller in the Fairy Glen being created in the park.

Part-time gardener Chris Armour actually saw one of them being driven off in a small blue hatchback, and she and Sylvia Russell, who chairs the Lanark Community Development Trust, tried to give chase but were too late.

Three large roundels, to be made into table tops, were created by the chainsaw carver, who has been working his magic on the remains of felled trees to make a fairy dell.

“They were going to be sanded and varnished as educational table tops, telling the story of what happened over the last hundred years,” said Sylvia.

The rings of the ancient cedar would be marked to show events, such as the start of World War One in 1914.

And the tables would be used when their storyteller visited to entertain youngsters in the dell.

“We noticed this morning one had gone,” said Sylvia.

“We were talking about it in the horticultural centre then Chris was leaving in her car when she shouted to me ‘I’ve just seen one of our table tops going past in the back of a small blue hatchback!’”

Sylvia got into Chris’s car, and they tried to chase the blue hatchback, but it turned out of St Patrick’s Road and by the time they reached the end of the road it had gone.

They don’t think it could have gone far, as the back would not shut with the wooden table top in it.

And they think the same people probably took both – making a second trip as they would not have managed two of the heavy slabs in the car.

“It is so infuriating,” said Sylvia.

“We are a community group- trying to make things nice and people come in and do this!”

The people who took the table tops might have thought, wrongly, that this was waste wood.

“They were not waste wood,” stressed Sylvia. “They had been set aside for a teaching purpose, and we would appreciate it if the person who took them would be kind enough to return them!”

And the third table top is locked securely in the compound.