Holding Up.

The fourteen foot dry stone cairn I rebuilt 5 years ago at the Royal Ashburn Golf course north of Whitby Ontario seems to be 'holding up'. It was knocked down by a violent twister back in 2006.

Stone Symposium in Asheville Part 4

One of the places on the Symposium tour of Asheville interesting buildings was the Grove Park Inn.

You can read all about it if you Google it. It is a huge stone and concrete structure which was built apparently without any plans ( so says our guide) in one year. The impression one gets from seeing this barrage of bulbous random shaped boulders clustered over the entire outside surface of the building is kind of disturbing. There were very mixed opinions about the whole thing. Ill let you guess what Sean and Patrick's was. 

Stone Symposium in Asheville Part 3

Masashi Mike Oshita, from the Asheville NC area, a classically trained Japanese gardener.http://japanesegardenservice.com/ spoke on Thursday at the Stone Symposium about JAPANESE SENSIBILITIES in the USE of STONE in GARDENS and LANDSCAPING 

After his talk he demonstrated some of the principles about rock placement in a garden using various small stones banzai trays with sand. Odd number of rocks work best. Lines of movement towards the biggest rock should be created. It was fascinating. It is curious how inanimate objects can command such a strong aesthetic message as to how they need to be placed. Hmmm.

Stonework Symposium in Asheville - Part 2

Steven Kidd, National Park Service archivist, gave a presentation at the Stone Symposium in Asheville yesterday afternoon on the bridges of the History of the Blue Ridge Parkway built during the WPA era. He had some terrific historical black & white photos of various stages of bridge construction back in the 30's.

Stonework Stone Symposium in Asheville . Part 1

I drove all the way from Port Hope to Ashveille last Monday to join over fifty other people attending this year's Stone Symposium in Asheville North Carolina.

2012 symposium

I met up Tomas and Patrick McAfee and with Sean Adcock who had just completed a dry stone walling course with 5 students.  The next day, three of the students ( Franklin, Josh and Matt, shown standing behind their training wall ) spent one more gruelling day in the hot sun, this time taking down and rebuilding a lot of the wall and successfully passed their test to acquire their beginners certification . Congratulations guys.

At the same time as all this was going on Nick Fairplay was teaching a course on stone carving. Along with about seven other students, my friends Akira (seen in photo above) and Evan were busy carving away and soaking up all they could learn from Nick who is an amazingly talented and prolific stone sculptor.

Patrick McAfee was at another location teaching a course on traditional stone masonry using lime mortar.

Later in the week, after the official meet and greet at the Lexington Ave Pub the night before, we gathered in the parking lot to begin a tour of the stonework at the famous Biltmore house. 

The Biltmore Gardens were impressive too, though Patrick and Sean and I thought the stone walls surrounding the main walled garden were a bit disappointing. I hope to take time to explain why in a future post.

Later in that day (and also in the evening) we gathered at the Masonic Lodge for several stone related presentations by a number of very interesting speakers including Vince Lee, Sean Adcock and William Westcott.

Nine Bridges

Over the last nine years I have had the honour of working with various wallers from other countries as well as students and members with Dry Stone Walling Across Canada (formerly Dry Stone Wall Association of Canada) and together we have built a total of nine dry stone bridges in Canada now. 

Here they are in chronological order. 

Springdale Bridge, Port Hope, 2004

Cornish Hollow Bridge, Cobourg, Ontario, 2005

Hubb Creek Bridge, Wellington, Ontario, 2006

Bruce Bridge, Coldsprings, Ontario, 2007

MacDougal Bridge, Russell, Ontario, 2008

Algonquin College Student's Bridge,  Perth, Ontario 2009

Kay's Bridge Landon Bay Centre 2010

Little Long Lake Bridge, Sydenham, Ontario, 2011

Monarch Bridge, Alderville, Ontario, 2012

Our tenth bridge will be a ten foot, wide 45 foot long double-arch bridge built this October during the Canadian Thanksgiving 'Festival of Stone' at St Marthe, Quebec.

I will be giving a presentation in Asheville, North Carolina about these nine bridges (and how they were constructed ) the afternoon of Friday, September 7th at the Stone Foundation's annual Rocknocker's Symposium headed up by Tomas Lipps. 

Festival of Stone - Double Arch Bridge - Foundation Work

The Festival of Stone bridge site.

The foundation blocks. 

The concrete bridge pier blocks are laid below grade.

The aggregate around the centre pier is compacted.

More blocks.

More pics to come.

Labour of Love

This Labour Day Weekend nine students taking a Dry Stone Walling Across Canada training course completed nearly 30 feet of dry stone wall at Ferris Provincial Park in Campbellford Ontario. This was very good going since not many of the stones were bigger than an average walling instruction manual. Building a wall with small stones is a challenge. It takes a lot of manual labour.

Everyone learned a lot. even though it was very hot.

The through stones went in seamlessly and almost simultaneously.

 

Some children appeared magically immediately after we finished repairing the wall and tested it out. They disappeared just as mysteriously.

The Stone Walls of Ferris.

"One of the special features of Ferris Park is the network of old stone walls that crisscross the landscape. These stone walls were built between 1873 and 1892 by a Scottish caretaker who worked for James Marshall Ferris 1st on the family farm. Mr Clarke brought the dry stone technique to Canada as did other European settlers. Carefully selected stone pieces were fit together without use of mortar. Evidence indicates that the walls were up to six feet high and three feet across at the top to a height of four feet.

The finished structures were steady and sound serving as a method of clearing the land of a seemingly endless supply of rock and providing field divisions to keep livestock in and predators out. Approximately seven kilometres of stone walls can be found throughout the southern part of the park. Unfortunately they are in trouble. Over the years the walls have not been maintained and have become obscured by vegetation and diminished by stone removal. In 2009 the Dry Stone Wall Association of Canada took on the challenge to restore these dry stone walls to bring back these artful landscape structures of our past."

We held another workshop dry stone wall at Ferris Provincial Park this weekend.

Participants were able to see the old walls and study the impressive section of repaired walls that now grace this section of the park . Tomorrow another thirty feet of wall will be restored.

The event tent with the restored wall in the background gives this latest workshop a festive air.

And thanks to the Friends of Ferris, everyone eats and drinks well too

Blackhouse Backdrop

Jordan Mason and Kelly Clayton's wedding was held at the Landman farm last week. It was held at the site of a very memorable Rocktoberfest walling event back in 2009. The wedding was well attended. It was a very moving gathering of family and friends, for Eric particularly, as Kerry his wife passed away less than two years ago.

No doubt part of the success of the occasion was having such a picturesque backdrop for the ceremony, one that Kerry and Eric had envisioned and worked hard together to create.  The famous blackhouse, which volunteer wallers from around the world came to help build in Grand Valley Ontario that year, was the occasion of the 6th Canadian Dry Stone Walling Festival.

The event was organized by members of D. S. Walling Across Canada with the the main blackhouse structure headed up by Dean McLellan.  This year's Festival of Stone will be Oct 4-8 2012 near Montreal. Chris Overing is helping with heading up some of the organizational details.

Jordan and Kelly's wedding

Formal procession of the form.

While Chris and I film the event , Danny, John, Ben, Jason, Bill and Karak carry the first form into position and place it on the wooden beam base (complete with fox wedges) over the stone foundation of the double arch bridge. The added music of Jean-Babtiste Lully made it seem like a real ceremony.

The pre-festival volunteer build this week near Montreal at Rigaud Quebec is going marvelously. During the Festival of Stone, Oct 4th to 8th, we hope to complete this the first bridge of its kind in Canada and remove the two forms on the Sunday afternoon.

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A rush to the bridge.

Yesterday seven wallers and I gathered at the magnificent country estate of Cote de Fleurs in St Marthe, to begin work on the special dry stone bridge that we hope to complete during the four days of the 'Festival of Stone', an international walling event held this year near Hudson Quebec. All kinds of stones and rocks were excitedly gathering here too, from far and wide, in hopes of being chosen to be fitted into this, the first double-arch bridge of its kind ever built in Canada.

Okay, everybody out.

A truck load of random sandstone eagerly waits to be let out of this dump truck just arriving from Ducharme Quarry an hours drive south of the festival site.

Whoopee, let's go guys !

Choose me, choose me.

This perfect naturally 'springer-shaped' hunk of red granite was found not far from where the bridge is being built . It seemed like it was just crying out to be used. It was amongst a pile of unwanted rocks left over from a nearby excavation going on where tons of bedrock had recently been removed in order to build a swimming pool. 

Let me down easy guys !

More stones like this huge chunk of armour stone (over a ton perhaps) were being flown in and dropped onto the bridge foundation by a John Deere loader, using Lewis Pins and a strong chains.