Just What The Doctor Ordered

This wall, completed early in the spring, was started in November of 2013. Then the snow came !! After an unusually long and severe winter I returned from California and went back chopping through the ice and snow to find the wall and the rest of the building stones to try to continue to build it again. 

This was late in March. In late April, the day I finished the wall, there was still snow around when I left. I thought the snow would never go away. 

Anyway, I came back last week to see the site all cleaned up and landscaped and behold NO SNOW !

The doctor who owns the property wanted a retaining wall that curved around her bungalow and gave the property a rustic charm. I think she got what she wanted.

Happily Lower After

Before

I usually am a great advocate for building tall walls. In fact the taller the better. Last year we were asked to shorten a section of flat coped wall that I had built continuing along an entrance way to very pretty property. (The rest of the walls were coped.) Yesterday I reluctantly shortened that flat section by about a foot. (I wish I had taken a better before picture.) 

After

To my surprise when I stood back at the end of the day I thought lowering the wall actually improved the look. What do you think?

Milestones

Dry stone walling across Canada has gone though many milestones. Lots of new wallers with fine skills are now keeping busy building all sorts of walls and dry stone features in Ontario, Newfoundland and Quebec and here, where I was visiting again in BC last week.  This arch we built kind of represents a milestone for me. 
Ten years of heading up a walling organization has paid off in terms of seeing wallers in Canada doing some amazing work.  Whether these men and women are certified or merely advanced in their skill level through good training and hard work doesn't matter. What does matter is that there is a spirit cooperation and respect and a desire to always improve (and not just obtain a piece of paper). Public installations like this one (though not a permanent one) help promote the craft where concrete products have reigned too long. The next milestone will be seeing walls without mortar, made of natural stone, become the leading choice across Canada over any kind of manufactured landscape product. 

Floating Stones ?

A fantastic theory of how the pyramids were made by floating huge blocks of stone through the desert and up into position.

I think you'd need way more bubble wrap than they had in Egypt back then.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TJcp13hAO3U
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C1y8N0e

Highland Games in Victoria BC

The dry stone exhibition arch installation at this year's Highland Games in Victoria BC was a spectacular success. 

Many people told us they came to the games again just to see what kind of exciting structure we would create this year. 

Thanks to Christopher Barclay who organized the build and to the talented wallers who volunteered to build this combination gothic arch with Irish slanted walls (complete with moss and Red Tail Hawk). 

Christopher, Eric, Jose and Me in front of our weekend project.

(portable toilets in the background are cleverly blurred out)

Thanks to Kevin Maloney who gave up two of his days to help on this project as well.

Thanks too to Island Stone for loaning us 8 tons of their local basalt.

(More pics to follow)

The Krak at Marenakos

The Krak was built last week under the instruction of Nick Aitken, with the help of Ken and Sunny, Eric Landman, Russ Beardsley, Alan Ash to name a few. 

This scaled down Krak is a complex looking structure, but when broken down into individual elements it was essentially an L shaped wall (plum on one side, 1: 2 batter on the other) with round pillars on the corners. 

The part that had everyone stumped for a while was on the quoin stones, and how to get the cylindrical shape to emerge from the pyramidal shape wall. After much head scratching they managed to carve the cylindrical shape into the unforgiving Pennsylvania blue stone. This stone only wants to break perpendicular to the grain so trying to acheave  a 1:2 batter into a 6" bed took up alot of time. Fortunately the guys at Marenakos guillotined the limestone blocks into pie shapes for the pillars and so sped up the process and get everyone back on track.

The builders had hoped to go higher with the towers but the lack of time and stone gave everyone an excuses to come back. All said it did make for an attractive structure. It was also great for wallers from Ireland,American and Canada to to come together to play with stones 

Photos by Sunny Wieler

No Turret Syndrome Here!

Sunny Wieler is resting on the north cheek end of the fortification wall.

It's a bit difficult to describe how it has to be shaped and fitted together at this transition point.

The metal post is set in the wall to give the axis for the trammel . The limestone triangle faces make the circular shape of the turret prescribed by the trammel string line. The darker stones continue to form the corner cleverly riding up the side of the turret. The second stone from the top one is a big one as it has to be both a corner stone and also reveal small rounds left and right of the emerging turret. What makes it more difficult is this stone is extremely hard to shape and pitch. Sunny and Ken and Donna and Eric and Nick are doing nice really work here. (It should be noted that no noisy gas cut off saws or electric grinders are being brought on this project.)

Here is the northwest corner starting to take shape.

 Ok, there was some sawing done off site to produce these lovely turret triangles.

Stonefest- A Challenging Project

These drawings by Patrick McAfee of the fortification walls participants are building this week at the Stonefest event held at Marenakos in Seattle are posted at the workshop site. The batter is seen to be more angled than a normal dry stone wall. From the corners and middle of this somewhat pyramid shaped wall three round turrets will start to emerge. 

Here is a corner almost ready for the round base of the turret to start to be built. One difficulty is pitching the grey Pennsylvania stone to the angle we need on this kid of wall. Stone usually breaks naturally more perpendicular to the grain. Pitching the individual faces to this acute batter without causing slices of the face to sheer off is quite challenging. 

Nick Aitken's Book

Master waller with the DSWA, Nick Aitken, after many years of work and research has nearly finished  compiling and editing a comprehensive book of terms, definitions descriptions and quotes about our trade. 

At Stonefest this week in Seattle, Nick lent me his rough draft (no photos or diagrams) of over 300 pages of fascinating information, including quirky walling phrases, poems, lists and obscure definitions. 

I had time to pick a few gems out to post here to tweak your interest, if you aren't already on the edge of your seat with anticipation. 

An ImpressiveTable of Contents.

Nick hopes to have the book published soon. There is still time to send him walling terms that you know of that may not yet be included in the book. He asks that you send them to stonedyker@talk21.com. Anyone wishing to help Nick finance the publishing of this important book please get in touch with him at that address.

There is even a chapter on derogatory names we give to stones that don't cooperate.

There are some tales of promiscuity here and there

And a few choice words here and there about 'art' and how years of experience provides freedom to do things differently and avoid the restrictions otherwise imposed on us through the various attempts made over the years to 'standardize' our trade.

Memorable Bridge

A recent photo sent to me by Christopher Overing taken in Spring MMXIVof the Double Arched Bridge built at the Canadian Stone Festival we ran near Montreal in 2012

Crevice Garden and Bench

At the kind invitation of Alexandra Morosco and Scott Hackney of Marenakos Rock Centre in Seattle 14 stone craftsmen and women gathered at the Whidbey Institute on Whidbey Island in Puget Sound for a special North American Stone Summit. 

Leaders (and friends) from Scotland, Ireland, Canada and the United States were chosen to attend a gathering of founding members and key people in various organizations that  promote the traditional craft of building or carving with stone. 

I will be posting a report on how the discussions and meetings went during this positive weekend encounter, but for now I'd like to show you the stone project we all collaborated on designing and building, as a kind of thank you to the people who hosted us at this wonderful event. 

The challenge was to change this unattractive side of the new stone patio into something more pleasing.

The plan was to use the left over stone that Marenakos had donated for the patio to hide the block wall and poured concrete terrace wall

 Well into the project, we came up with the idea of working a bench into the design

The next day (yesterday) we added a stone 'crevice garden'.

Back in Jan of 2012 I did a blog post about crevice gardens . You can read about it here.
http://thinking-stoneman.blogspot.com/2012/01/crevice-gardens.html

Purpose and Function

"People think they have to have a purpose. It is far more important that you have a function."  Farley Mowat 2011

Quote for the day

 "While we get something mysterious from the rocks, we give something back to them too." Farley Mowat

Farley Mowat at the 2006 Dry Stone Wall Festival

Unveiling of commemorative plaque at the Farley Mowat/DSWAC Ceremony in Port Hope Ontario Canada. Oct 18th 2006

 Many people gathered at Port Hope, as the rain clouds cleared and the sun came out, to see Canadian author Farley Mowat who was the guest of honour and main speaker, at the unveiling of the official bronze plaque mounted on a unique dry stone structure ( based on his book the Farfarers,) built over the Canadian Thanksgiving weekend. The 'Ancient Music Trio' provided a wonderful musical contribution during much of the ceremony. Farley looking sprightly despite a bad cold, read a passage from his book, which delves into the mystery of these little-known archaeological structures, found in parts of Arctic Canada. He explained in more detail his connection to the boat-roofed house project and giving his approval, expressed gratitude for all the effort that went into actually bringing it to completion. He went on to explain about the importance of putting things in historical perspective and that people should "... always remember that in terms of human discovery, no one is ever the first." 

Afterwards Stephen Smith ( whose property the monument was built on) spoke a few words and then Farley was invited to read the inscription on the plaque.

'Eight hundred years before Columbus sailed to the New World, seafaring walrus hunters and traders from Great Britain’s Northern Isles are believed to have landed in north eastern Canada, even before the Vikings arrived.

Venturing far from their homes, the adventurers sailed double-ended, open boats sheathed in walrus hides. As winter swept a hostile, treeless land, they flipped their light, translucent vessels on to dry stone foundations and used them as snug, boat-roofed houses.

This small-scale replica was inspired by archaeologist Thomas Lee’s excavations in Ungava, northern Quebec in the 1960s. It celebrates Canadian author and Port Hope resident Farley Mowat, who told the story of this long-forgotten people in The Farfarers.' 

                            --Port Hope Friends of Farley Mowat, 2006

Gone over the bridge

In early May of 2013 (nearly a year ago to the day) I had the great honour of taking Farley to see the dry laid bridge I and some friends built north of Cobourg, Ontario back in in 2004. He walked over it and stood quietly for a long time and then announced that he was a great lover of things built of stone.

Good Bye Farley.

Farley and Farley - My two best friends

photo by j shaw-rimmington - 2014-03-29

Farley died yesterday at the age of 92

Rest in peace my friend.

The Dodecahedron

John Bland a mason and a dry stone waller and who graduated of Algonquin college and has taken his craft in creative direction. Inspired by James Parker he has built a slate dodecahedron out of slate.

John says he loves the thinking/design process and the fabricating and laying out of the templates and guides. Although it is cemented together with thin set, John designed this so that it can be taken apart in sections.

Congrats John! You are certainly a talented and creative guy.

More Ribbons

A recent posting of mine mentioned 'ribbons of stone'.Here's what Nick Aitken kindly sent by way of some added thoughts on the subject.

"Near here is an old drystone wall which originally marked the boundary between two counties.
The wall is a tool of land management built by men who followed a line drawn by desk-bound planners, using the available material in the most efficient way to achieve a stockproof fence.
The style of build changes with the topography and the geology and leaves a story recorded in stone, very like a tape recorder which stores information on a plastic ribbon covered in finely crushed and processed stone dust.

It's only a difference of scale - once you learn how to replay the recording."

Thank you Nick for that analogy. Isn't it interesting too that no one uses 'tape recorders' or reels and reels of magnetic tape anymore. They have become past history. Walls, however, (-those ribbons of stone) for the most part have remained part of 'present' history.