Sugar Lake Quarry

Last week I was up in Northern Ontario building an entrance gate wall with pillars. We collected stones from a quarry near Spanish. A lot of people speak French there. No one spoke Spanish.

Huge piles of beautiful random shapes and sizes and colours of stone, before it all gets crushed into gravel,  looks like this.

Many were very natural blocky shapes. There was lots of nice cornerstone granite material.

We spent the first day picking out some real beauties.

Yummy

Stone Reproduction

There is a stunningly beautiful historic stone blacksmith shop in Tyrone Ontario. It is solid masonry squared fieldstone granite. It was built by a Mr Treneuth in 1854 conforming to a style typical of stonework introduced here in Ontario by masons who emigrated from Scotland nearly two hundred years ago. 

Having not seen it for some time I drove by the building again last week to check it out . It looks as impressive as ever.

About twenty years ago, back when I was doing traditional stone masonry predominately (not much dry stone walling back then)  a client of ours commissioned mason Glen Ward and I to build him an exact replica of the front of this building. He wanted to build an old looking garage to house his collection of antique cars.  

He provided us with many photos and exact measurements to go from. We visited the the old blacksmith shop and studied the original stonework very carefully and that summer we built this stone facade using local fieldstone from an old barn foundation, much of which still needed a lot of shaping and squaring. 

The other sides of the new building were framed and clad in board and batten,

Puppy Love

Farley, our new puppy, loves the dry stone shed we built. He thinks it's his new dog house.

Root canals.

The footprint of the drystone wall I'm building in Dorset Ontario had to travel over some big roots.

Best not to cut these suckers. 

This tree needs to be able to hang onto the side of the hill and get water and all the nourishment it can.  The bedrock here is sometimes only inches below the surface. It's all part of the Canadian shield and the thin covering of soil provides precious little for things to grow in as it is.

We've dug all around the roots, added clear aggregate for drainage and created a longish middle abutment.

Eventually I created three below grade 'piers' for lintel stones to straddle.

Another view. 

Note the slope of the grade. Again, for many reasons, it's good not to cut these roots, especially the uphill ones.

Here you can see the first of three 'straddle stones' which leaves two 'canals' for the roots to grow without affecting the wall.

Another view. 

The roots have plenty of room. The tree is pretty much full grown so the roots shouldn't get much bigger.

All three 'straddle stones' create a wide enough base for the rest of the wall to be built up over.

The section of wall to the left also has stile steps being incorporated into it . The triangle stone lying on the ground is pointing to the 'canals' I've created, which are barely visible above grade 

Most people wouldn't know there are root canals just to the left of the base of that tree in this photo but they are there. 

It's our job as wallers to see that the stones and the trees continue to get along.

Oh, and to get along with each other too !

Rocks just need a big root hug sometimes.

Unlike people, trees can hug rocks for more than just a few minutes.

They may be small hugs sometimes but they still last a long time. 

Rocks and trees can have a common root and a common bond. 

And trees never let big rocks stump them.

A nurse tree rhyme

Rock abides boldly in the tree top, 

As if the tree grows to cradle that rock,

When the boughs break and limbs come apart,

Down will come boulder conceptual art.

(An ode to Andy Goldsworthy and his 'Stone Coppice' which I saw when Jason Hoffman and I visited Jupiter Artland in Edinburgh last October) 

jupiterartland.org/artwork

Alan Ash Article

My good friend Alan Ash is in the news again building beautiful walls.

http://www.eugeneweekly.com/20131114/gardening/power-walls

Read more about Alan in a blog I posted earlier this year.

alan-ash-visits-us-in-california

An 'alternative rock' video

Hands take much longer to wear out

New Gloves

Same gloves- two weeks old

Hands are amazing . They last a lifetime.

Jason Hoffman - On finishing a wall.

Finished wall with turf top

Sometimes when I finish building a wall people ask me if I'm happy with it. 

Usually I am, but then there are things I think I've learned along the way and might have done differently next time. 

I asked Jason Hoffman how he felt about this his latest wall now that he'd finished it. ( I had a particular interest in the wall, as I had the pleasure of helping build the cheekend in the photo above, when I was visiting Jason in Scotland last October. ) Anyway, here is what he wrote back.

I love the process of building but feel terrible when I finish.  I guess on the big jobs you spend many days at the same location, talking to the clients and the neighbours, using their kitchen and toilet, that you start to feel part of the place.  And then when you finish the work, you look at the completed work and go “eek”.  I wish I had made the wall elliptical.  I wish it had been more pronounced height changes.  I wish I had coursed that bit more.  I wish the batter had been more consistent.  Etc etc etc.  However, the client loves it, the neighbours love, and the passers-by love it!  I’m glad to finish and move on.  I am being over-self critical! 

Thanks Jason for the photo of the finished project and letting us see a little more into the life of a waller too.

Just say no to mortar

Photo by Nick Aitken

Curved space and time travel

The light at the end of a tunnel that begins as a Roman arch looks surprising like a Gothic arch, if that tunnel is curved. It's fascinating to consider this as a sort of spacial representation of the evolution and history of the arch form.

Stonechat

This year's Stone Foundation 'Stone Symposium' was held in Santa Fe.
Among the many people there my good friend Sean Adcock flew in from Wales to participate.

While there he taught a dry stone wall course and also gave an audio visual presentation.

Sean wrote recently to tell me his symposium talk was about a great publication called Stonechat... " and its imminent demise. Subscriptions are down by about a third, so less than 50 people pay to get it now, and less than 1 download per week of the free ones on line. Most annoyingly only 4 DSWA branches now support it. We can still afford to keep doing it but the lack of support has completely sapped my enthusiasm. You might do something on your blog and say that it costs only £8 in UK for numbers 29, 30, 31 ; £14 to North America; £11 to Europe, sterling via paypal. "

Same wall material - Two different wallers

Any thoughts?

When there is snow trace of tools

I was working up in Dorset Ontario last week in the first snow fall of the season 

I'd left my tools out over night and they were cold and difficult to hold.

This and the snow shadow the tools left was a reminder to me to use tools sparingly.

I prefer the look of a dry stone wall with a minimum of fresh cuts, chisel scars and hammer marks on the stones.  If one leave s no trace of having used tools, carefully fitting the random shaped stones mostly as they come, the wall will have a very satisfying peaceful natural appearance

The Irish reluctance to build the arches.

Patrick McAfee and I were talking about this very old bridge in Dingle Ireland a while back and we remarked at how the opening begins as corbeling and then switches part way up to be built more like a true arch . He said he thought it demonstrated the deep inherent mistrust the Irish had for the roman arch when it came along. They much preferred to keep using lintels and corbeling in their architecture.

Opus 40

Opus 40 a dry stone 'sculpture' near Woodstock in upstate New York was one of the first landscape art installations of the 20th century, and was the life work of Harvey Fite.

Fite was a Professor at Columbia University's Barr College having set up the Fine Arts course there. He appears to have been something of a character, having dropped out of both law studies and subsequent studying for the priesthood to become an actor and then sculptor, as part of the famed Mavericks community at Woodstock.

Once established at Barr he began to look for somewhere to live and came across an overgrown disused quarry near Saugerties, a ready supply of stone and wood, what more could a sculptor want? He purchased the property in 1938 and begun the construction of a series of ramps and platforms on which to display his sculptures. A network of paths and steps navigate the site, with ponds fed from a natural spring incorporated into the structure. Fite carried out most of the work himself, with occasional labouring help, apparently he hated anyone else laying a stone. The structure grew and soon he realised that it dwarfed his sculptures, it itself had become a sculpture. The central plinth's sculpture, 'Flame', was obviously too small and in the early 60s was replaced by a 9 tonne monolith around 14 feet tall. Harvey had discovered this some 10 years earlier in a stream bed, but it 'bridged' two properties, one belonging to a church and the priest wanted far more than Harvey could afford. It is in keeping with the man, his vision, patience and dedication to Opus 40, that he just waited and outlasted the priest who eventually died, his successor was willing to part with the stone and it duly took up its place.

Work on the site continued, sections were rebuilt and additional areas developed. Work came to a sudden halt in 1976 when Harvey accidentally drove a lawn mower off a quarry edge on the site, the section of amphitheatre wall he was working on, with its huge capstones lined up for installations remains unfinished as 'monument' to him.

The work itself seems to strike at people's emotions. The public seem to love it, some revere it, others invest it with mystical qualities. Some decry anyone working on it or any form of maintenance and sacrilege, an insult to Harvey's dream. Artistic appreciation is very much a personal thing, I can accept people not liking something that does not appeal to their aesthetic. I have not heard of anyone decrying Opus 40 on the grounds of it being some form of artistic carbuncle however many wallers seem to have a love hate relationship with it some have even suggested it be dynamited and rebuilt 'properly'. Does a running joint make it any less an achievement, or of less artistic value? 

I can't help but think some people cannot see the structure for the stone. I like to think there is a walling equivalent  to saying 'you can't see the wood for the trees', something along the lines of not being able to see the wall for the stone. That doesn't quite seem to apply here.

It is clearly built by an amateur, but just because it is built with dry stone who are we to judge it purely on this basis that it is not technically correct. 

The best analogy I can come up with is it being the waller/stonemason equivalent of a cabinet maker criticising African tribal art for being technically crude. Surely the point is being missed somewhere and anyway could you lift and balance a less than regular 9 tonne needle on a pillar?

Thanks go to Sean Adcock of Stonechat Magazine for writing this comprehensive article for Thinking With My Hands.

Hewie inspects the tumulus