When you are building a dry stone wall you often need to find stones with certain specific shapes. It helps to have names for these shapes so that you can ask the wallers you are working with if they've got a 'triangle stone' or 'hook stone' for instance, for using in a certain difficult section of the wall. The obvious name/shapes that come to mind are ones like 'flat one', 'square cornered' (or what we call a 'ninety' ), throughstone , builder stone , and cope stone. There is an elongated shape stone we have had to give a special name to because we often end up looking for these as we are building, in order to fill in certain irregular slots in the wall. The main attribute of these kind of stones are that they have to have length, so that when inserted into the wall they aren't going to fall out, but they can be of any height or width. They can also be any size. Eighteen inch ones are as valuable as six inch ones. These 'hotdog' stones, as we call them, turn out to be pretty valuable. You save them as you're going over the pile of stones, because you can be pretty sure you are going to need quite a few of them in the wall before it is finished.
Today, on 'Thinking With My Hands' it seemed appropriate to honour the humble 'Hotdog Stone', or as it is more reverently called, - 'The Hallowed Wiener'
