Wednesday, November 14, 2012

Throughstones

A dry stone wall I'm working on this week.

While it's a good idea to put throughstones at regular intervals along a dry stone wall to make it more structural (if you have enough long stones in your random selection of stone to do so) I usually prefer not to have these high-profile thigh-smackers sticking out either side, even though my walls are generally random rubble style. Granted you can't often differentiate them from the rest of the builder stones in the wall, but that's not the point.

Usually the reason they stuck out on traditional British walls was either because the lord of the property wanted to see them just to make sure the hired wallers were not skimping on them, or more often because the random stones that were long enough to serve as through stones were often awkward to shape, and common wallers building miles and miles of enclosure walls wouldn't have wanted to risk accidentally breaking them shorter than desired, just because they wanted to try to make them fit the exact width of the wall.