Putting the gloves back on.

I spent yesterday working with seven students rebuilding a one hundred year old wall near Campbellford, Ontario. The wall is part of a network of walls at Ferris Provincial Park. The original land was owned by the Ferris family and about 15 miles of walls were built when the land was cleared starting about 1896. This is the second year the DSWAC has been involved in restoring these historic walls. Many of them are very wide 'consumption walls' which helped to store the vast amounts of stone that came out of the limestone bedrock every year up through the shallow soil.

The 35 feet of wall we are repairing in the park at this workshop has had about a third of the stones stolen or removed for other purposes over the last 60 years. Luckily the walls are still wide enough that there is enough material to rebuild them to their original height in the same style using the original stone.

Speaking of original. These are old metal maple syrup buckets which we are using to hold our hearting. Carol Robertson, one of the Friends of Ferris, provided these antique buckets for the workshop. They sure look better than the plastic ones we normally use. We like to think they would have been used around the same time as the walls were originally built. Not only will these stones add to the structural composition of the wall, sitting in these beautiful metal buckets they make a nice composition for a photo too.

Below is a photo of the wall with the three step stile we repaired last year, along with the string line set up for the new stretch we are fixing this year. Local vet and workshop participant Kathy Wilkins is putting on the gloves to put in one more hour of work which then ends this first wonderful day of walling at the park.

Handy Containers

Consider the common five gallon plastic bucket. There was a day when these handy bulk containers were not so common, and a day not so long ago when they didn't even exist. It is hard to imagine how we survived without them. How did we store and transport such varied commodities as paint, engine coolant, mayonaise, ice cream, canned fruit, driveway sealer, lime putty, log house chinking compound, stucco, deep fryer grease and liquid laundry detergent? And more importantly how did they build dry stone walls without them? Did they collect and carry the small stones needed for 'hearting' in sheep skins perhaps, or wooden buckets? Did they use burlap sacks or old canvas bags?

These buckets are absolutely 'indispensable', which is funny because you see people dispensing of them everywhere you go. The dumps are full of them. Stacks of empty buckets can be found behind every commercial establishment from small restaurants to big industrial complexes, all of them just waiting to be picked up for garbage. For us humble dry stone wallers the backs of these buildings are prosperous hunting grounds for the treasured 'hearting holders'. Clean buckets are the best, but we even go with ones still containing sticky residue resins or half-dried stucco. Presumably it should all mix together with the broken stone fragments to help everything 'tighten up', and hey, any extra dry wall compound should be perfect, right?

Above is a photo of some buckets being used for hearting in the Lake District. You might say these buckets were previously loved. Zin Tec produced and stored their feed supplements for cows, beef, sheep, lambs, horses and ponies in them. The buckets now have been given a second life by the farmers who have been re-building the wall in the background. Instead of heading straight for the dump the feed buckets have been salvaged. Its nice to know in the dry stone walling business not only all the stones are saved and reused in repairing gaps and building new walls, but even the handy containers we use are all recycled buckets.

Oh, there is another way of 'reusing' these plastic buckets to make walls. You will need a whole lot more of them however, and the final look, well it might not be quite as attractive.

The bucket: the waller's hand bag.

The waller's tool bag or tool box is often just a bucket. We can carry it out to the field and empty the tools out, if necessary, and then use it for a container for 'hearting' as well. I have seen some pretty fancy tool bags and seen some pretty beat up ones as well. We masons tend to be tough on things. But a simple plastic 5 gallon bucket isnt very expensive and can be easily replaced. A lot of small stones can be brought to the wall at one time, instead of picking them up individually, tossing them near the wall, and looking for, and collecting them again. The waller who comes to work without a bucket or two has forgotten his most useful tool.
The hands do the carrying. It is called hand-balming. This is a pretty simple concept but still worth thinking about.
There have been some pretty humble professions throughout history that involve mostly carrying things.
I think about the people who go back and forth from the fields carrying produce, or those who bring water back from a river or a hand dug well, or those who lug stone material back from the quarries or move rocks by hand from the fields they are clearing. I think about how they came up with different ways to carry things and different things to carry them in. And how their hands got tired and they would stop and switch hands. I think about the people who depended on them to carry things day after day. It was a noble and meaningful occupation for anyone with a good back and strong hands, or so it seemed.
Our hands don't carry things much any more. It's not smart. We have nap sacks, suitcases and hockey bags on wheels, golf carts, shopping carts, motorized vehicles, as well as water pipes to provide water, gas lines to provide heating, snowmobiles trucks and ATVs to transport supplies, and any number of gadgets to save us lifting or carrying just about anything.
The hands presumably now have a lot of time to do other things. But I still like to carry stuff when I can. I often don't re-park my truck but carry my tools the extra distance.
Maybe that's why I like walling so much. It's silly really. Maybe I do it just to make sure my hands don't get out of practice carrying things. Or perhaps my hands can't come up with any better ways to be 'handier'.