The cairn that we have been building the last two weekends uses a pattern of fitting the stones together that involves a good deal of 'thinking with your hands'. Because we are using a lot of leftover stone from a big wall job there are lots of pieces with odd angles and not as many nice shapes left to work with. It turns out the pattern we've adopted for the project is working quite well, but it gets difficult when you accidentally work your way into a tricky spot. There are styles which have been placed strategically around the cairn at various heights so the we can stand on them to build higher. Our client tells us their grandchildren will want to climb them too. Apparently they are very good climbers. They were helping us for a while with some of the smaller hearting last week.
Here they are standing waving.
Tomorrow it might be good to take a look at how to meet some of the challenges presented to anyone thinking of building in this random diagonal style.
