While the field stone walls in most of the Rappahannock County walls are predominately constructed from a speckled oatmealy granite gathered from the land, there is a small amount of random quartzite chunks too speckled in the mix.
The granite darkens uniformly to an almost charcoal grey. The white quartzite always looks white.
If you are building a wall and you want to use all the stones you have on your property the question becomes what do you do with the stuff. Maybe it doesn't matter what it looks like if you're just paid to make walls.
However, dotted in many of the walls I've seen in the county, the white stones look annoying like plastic grocery bags messily blown up against the side of the walls, especially from a distance.
One solution we noticed was a section of wall where the builder had saved up the white quartzite to make a ribbon of white running along the middle of the wall. Much tidier!
Another fanciful idea we came across was an entrance way where they had spread the quartzite all along the top of the wall like icing on a cake.
I think I would just wait and save enough of it up and make a completely white wall somewhere far away from the house - or maybe not use it at all.
