Last Friday, Saturday and Sunday, fifteen members of Dry Stone Walling Across Canada met for a lively retreat at the new site where Rocktoberfest will be held in the Caledon Hills, in southern Ontario. Hart House Farm, a property owned by the University of Toronto was chosen for the location of our annual DSWAC gathering as a convenient way to become familiar with this large country property where we will be presenting some exciting walling events during our four day Thanksgiving dry stone walling festival.As well as walking over the property to look over the many facilities on the farm, we spent time discussing the new direction of the DSWAC. Everyone cooperated in designing a special festival dry stone amphitheatre project for the farm and brainstormed together to come up with a new approach to running several of the other regular festival attractions. We attended evening presentations including one by Chris Lea director of activities at Hart House and Evan Oxland who recently returned from Japan where he studied dry stone castle construction.
Members participated in some pretty challenging miniature indoor dry stone building activities and kept busy the whole weekend despite the rainy weather. The gourmet meals were prepared by a highly skilled professional Toronto chef and included fresh rainbow trout, wild leaks and shatike mushrooms picked fresh off the farm property. Everyone who attended this three day gathering agreed that it was a spectacular success.
All this week I hope to post pictures of some of highlights of this event and to present some of the creative ideas we came up with
But first let's look at a few pics that show the caliber of the meals we all enjoyed during this special DSWAC Hart House farm retreat.
