The upper black granite ring.

Sean wrote about the ring ..."Having reached what was the upper point of the curve on the inside wall there was still some debate as to where we were going from there. It was agreed however that we needed some form of cap that would facilitate whatever madcap scheme we (in reality John)  came up with.  The requirement was some sort of ring of stones of a relatively uniform height and some length to step out a bit but mostly go into the wall.  At this height the wall was some six inches or so out from its start point, which with the six inch ‘central’ deflection meant that the wall was effectively overhanging by around 12 inches.  So stones that were 24” long would have around half their length inside our start point at foundation level.  Elsewhere on site there was a collection of black granite lengths that fitted the bill, varying thicknesses and lengths and mostly around 6 inches in one dimension.  Once again we were killing some marvellous stones in the name of progress.  Somehow the job got delegated to me and a chisel…not your usual combination of tools.  I measured and estimated..  I reckoned we needed around 80 of them from highly random sample of thicknesses. Two foot wasn’t going to be possible but a satisfying number of 18” and lots of 16” would.  I tried to cut the lengths efficiently so nothing would be that short. This stone breaks marvellously well, even I can do it and it only took a couple of hours even with all my thinking time.  One of my abiding memories was the look on Peters face and his astonishment that I had achieved all that just with a hammer in a couple of hours, I think it even made up for the fact that he had got to move them all the way back across the property having only just moved them the opposite way.

Not sure who came up with the idea of 6 white 'spacer' ones, other than it was a safety measure as we’d be struggling to find more of the black granite if we ran out.  The 6 white ones were equidistant corresponding to the position of the basalt, basically starting halfway between the two doors and working out from there.  Pretty certain John came up with that one.  Another minor detail that very few will notice no doubt, in that imperfect black ring.  The black stones were set so that lengths were well mixed up and as they fanned out the tails were wedged.