Kingsmere August 2015

Last weekend's Kingsmere workshop was a success. A twenty-eight foot section of wall was restored and the dry stone enthusiasts who attended were delighted to have learned and accomplished so much.   

Before

After

Walling On Our Bellies

After a slow morning of taking apart the stones in the old wall at the restoration workshop in Kingsmere yesterday, we gathered for a scrumptious gourmet lunch supplied by Boulangei Ville

No doubt the good food had a lot to do with our increased productivity that afternoon and the quality of workmanship.

Walling and Picnic Lunches.

Today we are all set up to do two days of repairs to a section of wall at an NCC property near the nation's capital in the Gatineaus. We do this at Kingsmere every August now as part of a special dry stone wall restoration/workshop program. 

If you are in the Ottawa area you might like to come out and see what we are doing this Saturday or Sunday. There's yummy gourmet pita bread sandwiches and desserts too from the local bakery. Who knows, there may be some extra vegan sandwiches left over, so feel free to join us for lunch!

Rain game.

Rainy hot humid slippery heavy stones yesterday….

I fought the wall and the wall won.

I see stone chips.

A very well done dry laid feature made from flagstone at the Castlehill Heritage Centre, Castletown, Caithness

Natural Stone Works!

Dan pearl sent photos of a beautiful moon gate he recently built on his property.  

He explained

 "I started this 5 years ago intending to build it with a batch of odd shaped cobbles stones I had been collecting.  It mostly sat as the base portion of stone built up to just the bottom center keystone and 4-5 stones either side of it.  I kept finding that the neighborhood kids would dislodge everything with constant climbing and trash my batter lines.  It was always one step forward and two back to restore the bottom of the arch.  It ends up as a bit of an oval because I refused to strip out and reset the last round of disruptions.  

Holly and I are planning to build a new home here on our lot.  The stone leftovers from various jobs were in the way and I couldn't bare to abandon the project after all this time so I just used the stones laying around with minimal trimming to get it done. 

No machines were used in the building and all the big stones were walked up the outside steps to be placed.  

Couldn't of done it without you sharing your knowledge freely- both arches and moon gates.  For that I am grateful.  Thank you! "

Thank you, Dan . It looks terrific!

Dan lives near Rochester N Y and can be contacted at

   dan pearl
  natural stone works, LLC
       107 Long Pond Rd
    Rochester, NY 14612 
     ph: (585) 260-8653www.naturalstoneworksny.com

Re-membering

After storing them for sometime near his mother's house, Evan Oxland, (who brought them back from their spectacular debut at Toronto's Nuit Blanche in 2012) arranged to deliver this cheery collection of stony, painted-faced memorabilia back to our property in Port Hope.

And here they remain, (resting up for some future occasion perhaps) a whimsical reminder of happy days when dry stone walling was allowed to be structurally spontaneous at times and good wallers felt encouraged to adventure into different areas of creativity without risking their reputations.


Evan Oxland and Akira Inman certainly organized an exciting event that night. 

"Wall Spray was a dry stone Mashup." Evan explained, "The idea was to bring the rural to the urban."

There was a whole lot going on - music, dancing and a continuous light show. The graffiti wall became a kind of transmogrification, an evolving mixture of artists, craftsmen and audience, advancing the ever-changing stone wall eastward along the busy Toronto sidewalk   

It was a fresh concept, and though unorthodox, embodied the spirit of Canadian walling, which was, and hopefully will remain, entirely friendly, inclusive and non-competitive. 

Perhaps the relocated Nuit Blanch stones will be re-membering.

Dry Stone Walling Across the World

Photo: Camel Hump is the longest continuous dry stone wall in Australia. (Supplied: Prue Chapman)

While not a lot of comments are posted to this blog directly, both Thinking With My Hands and the DSWAC website get lots of feedback via private emails from around the world. We mostly get inquiries about the dry stone work opportunities in Canada. Occasionally we get requests for information about wallers who would be interested in traveling and working in far away lands. 

Below is a sample letter I received yesterday. It sounds like a great opportunity for someone with artistic walling skills and a taste for adventure.


< Greetings Canada, here from Australia. Maybe you can pass on my contact to any strapping young lad that might want to work down under and build me a wall or two. I live quite close to the fabulous Gold Coast and am looking for someone who wants an awesome working holiday.I have plenty of wonderful rocks to create with!! Similar to a wwoof-ing experience, I'm offering amazing accommodation, meals and a car and a fantastic holiday, in exchange for 4 days a week creating some rock art. Open to any discussions.
Cheers,
Dr.A T >

I will provide the contact information if you are interested.

Talking about my generator

Like several of our neighbours here in Port Hope we installed a generator after the big ice storm of 2014. It is situated conspicuously in front of our above ground pool. (The pool is hidden by the Engleman Ivy)  To disguise the plastic, very out of place 'look' of the the generator, we built a free standing dry stone wall around it. 

Now it's as if the generator has just 'faded away'. 

It seems to me that this is very simple solution and could be applied in situations where you had propane tanks or other unsightly things on your property that you wanted to hide.

Sunny Side of the Hill

We have a project on the go involving terracing up the south side of a concave hollow sloping away from a small creek which we built a 12 foot span dry stone bridge across ten years ago.

The walls will be curved and have rounded pillars to the east.

Unfortunately the hollow where we are working is a like a huge bowl that concentrates the sun's heat right at us. It is a heat sink. There is little shade and no breeze there.

The project kind of reminds me of these hot walls in sunny Danville California where next door I was commissioned to do a dry stone installation involving curvy walls using stones on the bias, as well as creating a small slanted moon gate feature.

Watching the watch tower go up.

Work continues all this week on the Fish Rock Lookout Tower. The huge combination stone step and floor section has been carved and lifted and set in place.

The watch tower is being built in the perfect place to be able to see the ocean.

Thanks to Amanda Stinsen and David Claman for photos

In the Zone.

The first week on the job Dylan got poison ivy on his arms. He went to the walk in clinic after a weekend of scratching and got a prescription for some prednisone. For some reason he seems to have super human strength now. He was lifting incredible size rocks all day yesterday and did the job of two men. Needless to say Dylan is proving to be a really good worker. 

Nice Niche

Sean Donnelly built this cute little gothic niche with his assistant Nash over the past couple of days at the Highland games in Fergus Ontario. He said "I wasn't sure how I was going to finish it off, but after reading your post this morning I went with the traditional copes" 

Stone - The Other Grey Matter

Think With Stone .

Ennismore unveils new dry stone wall and archway

Ennismore unveils new dry stone wall and archway

The Ennismore Arch would not have happened were it not for the three women standing to right of me - Hellen Young, Sarah Sulivan and Gail Woodard.  

Many thanks also to the Ennismore Horticultural Society . 

There are a lot of volunteers who helped and the DSWAC students who did so well completing this arch over two consecutive weekends last summer.  
And now, thanks to everyone who came out yesterday to this unveiling event.

The Ennismore Hort Society showed a lot of forward thinking in organizing on such a grass roots level, members of their community to gather and create such a fine looking permanent stone feature. It commemorates Ennismore Ontario and the Irish culture connected with it, and does so by utilizing local people and material, rather than having a construction company come from outside the community to build some impersonal concrete edifice that would have had no real connection with the people. The arch demonstrates the skills and enthusiasm that the people of this small southern Ontario community uniquely possess.

We had fun building this dry stone arch. It was a great experience and the impact the finished structure creates now as you come round the corner suggest that something very special happened here and continues to do so.

Bruce Bridge

Immediately after we built Bruce Bridge back in 2008 we planted the walking surface of this Dry Stone Walling Across Canada bridge with a variety of sedum. 

On revisiting the property much later it was obvious the plants were thriving, doing better than I'd expected with all the foot traffic and even mowers driving over it occasionally.

The round fieldstone copes were an experiment. Introducing local glacial granite into the quarried limestone mix created an interesting visual border as well as forming two prominent and very stable 'curbs' for vehicles to pass between.   

A Copeless Situation.

Presently we are rebuilding some old farm walls north of Peterborough Ontario. The mossy fieldstone is piled 3 feet thick and 8 feet wide along the hedge rows. Here's a section we've done with finished copes and then another photo with the copes taken off. We were asked to take them off, as the client didn't like the look of them. Hmm. Which style do you like?

What to do with potatoes?

I'm thinking about what to do with four tons of potatoes

That's how many we are hoping to have for the children's dry spud walling events at Amherst Island during this year's Irish-Canadian Dry Stone Festival. See http://www.dswa.ca/story/latest-news

I know one thing. All the kids who will be joining us that weekend won't be couch potatoes ! 

Something really special here

Dry stones represent history, both old and new,...

May contain nuts

I have no idea who built this recently built mortared wall at the Kingsmere estate in the Gatineaus near Ottawa Canada. It looks like a British Picnic Bar. 

The original historic dry stone walls we have been restoring there at Kingsmere each year look a bit different. Yes, though the walls our students rebuild at these workshops each year look 'sweet', they don't look like chocolate bars.

Catch the next beginner's seminar this August 22nd and 23rd.

Link to - Kingsmere Basic Restoration Walling Class

Where to be in the picture?

Having just completed the dry stone workshop, news reporter with the Haliburton Echo, Darren Lum had us stand in front of our stonework in order to take this photo. 

Afterwards Marion gave him her camera and asked him to take one more with us standing behind the sculpture. I think this one gives a better indication of the scale and shape of the spiral ramp structure we created.

Maybe its best to not be in the picture at all.

Marion Daniels took many photos of us building Spiral Ascent including this one when the directors of the sculpture park came to see our progress. 

Dreaming and Waking.

A day at the cottage becomes an escape into a miniature world. With the transforming assistance of sand heaped onto a cluster of rocks not far from the main dock, jutting out of Lake Papineau, a castle is born and a new inhabited land emerges. 

Small stone dry laid arches make for charming little bridges linking the islands. Dripped fistfuls of sand leave melted pine trees clinging to imaginary cliffs. Staircases formed with a kitchen spatula lead up to the main tower where tiny people look out over the rocks and feast their eyes on the sea below.

The lake water surrounds this tiny island getaway, lapping patiently against the make-believe shoreline . This is a place to lose oneself in - a sleepy fairy tale dream, a place of rest, until a noisy motor boat surges past and destroys it all with its wake. 

Nevertheless, this miniature world remains as magical and real as it is temporary.

Wine and Bridge Lovers.

Wine Lovers Escape to Prince Edward County

It's always encouraging to see one of our bridges make the travel section of the newspaper! However I don't think this one is the largest anymore.