Winged Wall

Future boulders wall on the right

I find that boulders are very hard to integrate into a dry stone wall.

Ones that have been specially chosen for their shape or colour or whatever are the most difficult to build with. When I was asked to incorporate some into a wall running along Peter Mullinsnew property that he'd hand picked and had delivered on site and sent me photos of, I had no idea at first how I could use them in a dry stone installation and not have it look clunky and cheesy. 

I began developing a scalloped wall/boulder design based on ideas

I had been thinking about and sent a few drawings to Peter. 

The final dry stone wall design we came up with looked like wings arching away from them. The boulders were structural but also could be interpreted as the bird heads

When I arrived in California, Sean Adcock and Patrick McAfee and I began working out the dimensions and determining the design of the wall even more. After we looked at the boulders and the mica quartzite stone material an the site we considered at the idea of not only curving the wall sections on plan but also arching them like wings.

Patrick did copious measurements and scale drawings to work out the heights and the curve of the wing sections

We thought to use a huge length of cargo ship rope that Peter had to mark out the curves but it became very unwieldy so we winged it and and used string lines and stakes.

We chose smaller boulders and barred them into place.

The first two courses of each 'wing' were laid in courses between the boulders

Then began the task of laying the upright 'feather stones' between the bird head boulders.

We are using 2 and 3 inch flag stone material from Sidney Peak Quarry. Very slow going.  

photo by Alan Ash

This is how one of the wing sections looks so far.