On Schedule

The Dry Stone Walling Association of Canada (Dry Stone Canada) is in full preparation mode for the 2015 Dry Stone Festival. 

The event will take place from September 25 - 27th on Amherst Island in Lake Ontario 30 km west of Kingston Ontario

This year they are collaborating with the Dry Stone Walling Association of Ireland to celebrate and commemorate Canada’s rich Irish cultural heritage. 

Amherst Island has one of Canada’s largest concentration of historic dry stone walls, some close to 200 years old, most built by original settlers from Ireland. Efforts are underway to have the site designated as a National Historic Site due to the significance of these cultural heritage structures. 

There will be a 2-day workshop on dry stone wall construction featuring various Irish dry stone wall techniques that will be incorporated into one permanent new wall. The finished wall will include a time capsule installed by the Ambassador to Canada from Ireland, Ambassador Ray Bassett. 


This event is completely open to the public. 

Dry Stone Canada’s Irish-Canadian Dry Stone Festival 2015 Public Activities Schedule

A shuttle bus will provide transport on Amherst Island to the various venues. 

Friday, September 25th

Neilson Store Museum & Cultural Centre at 5220 Front Road

    1pm to 4 pm – Museum open and guided walking tours of historic Village of Stella available 

Amherst Island Public School at 5955 Front Road

    1pm to 4 pm - Display Area open

Emerald Music Festival Site at 12675 Front Road

    Music Featuring: 

    5 pm – 6:45 pm  - Seventh Town 

    7 pm – 8:45 pm  - O’Schraves

    9 pm – 10:30pm - Cyril & Blackie 

Saturday, September 26th 


Amherst Island Public School at 5955 Front Road

    10 am – 4 pm  - Stone Carving, Children’s Potato Walling Workshop, and traditional music demonstrations 

    10 am – 4 pm – Display Area open


Neilson Store Museum & Cultural Centre at 5220 Front Road

    10 am to 4 pm – Museum open and guided walking tours of historic Village of Stella available 

Reidview Farm at 10850 Front Road

    11 am – 4 pm – Harvest Festival 


Emerald Music Festival Site at 12675 Front Road

    Music & Dancing featuring

    10am – Noon - Mark McGreevy  

    Noon – 12:30 - Kelly School of Irish Dance 

    12:30 – 2:20 - Seventh Town 

    2:30 – 4:30 - Turpin’s Trail 

    7pm – 9pm  - O’Schraves  

    9:20pm – 10:30pm - Cyril & Blackie  

Irish Walling Construction Site  - Located Across Road from School at 5955 Front Road

    9 am – 4pm – Dry Stone Walling Construction

    5 pm  Irish piping of dignitaries to the Irish Sampler Wall.  

               Welcome Remarks and Introduction by President of Dry Stone Canada.  

               Irish Ambassador to install a Time Capsule, 

               Jane Urquhart to lay a carved stone

               President of Amherst Island Women’s Institute to lay stone from Ards Peninsula.

 

Sunday, September 27th


Amherst Island Public School at 5955 Front Road

    10 am – 3 pm – Stone Carving & Children’s Workshop & traditional music demonstrations

    10 am – 3 pm – Display Area open

Neilson Store Museum & Cultural Centre at 5220 Front Road

    10 am - 3 pm – Museum open and guided walking tours of historic Village of Stella available

Emerald Music Festival Site at 12675 Front Road

    Music Featuring

    Noon – 1:45pm -Turpin’s Trail

    2:15pm – 3:45pm  - O’Schraves

 Irish Walling Construction Site  - Located Across Road from School at 5955 Front Road

    9 am – 5pm - Dry Stone Walling construction

    6:05 pm - Presidents of Dry Stone Canada and Dry Stone Walling Association of Ireland lay carved stone

    6:45 pm - Sunset event will take place

 Traditional music will be played by members of the O’Schraves to recognize the closing of this event.

Bridge in troubled water

Our latest project involves terracing the hill leading down to the creek where Cornish Hollow Dry Stone Bridge was built ten years ago. The bridge is built in a flood plain. The creek overflowed its bank during the huge downpour we had last weekend in Ontario.

It's nearly all dried up again now. Phew!  That makes it much easier to find our stones and to use our wheelbarrows.

Oh, and the bridge?

It's perfectly fine too.

Guinness and Walls

After a hard day of walling the idea of a couple of pints of Guinness and the vision of beautiful dry stone walls seem to somehow merge.

On the beach

Here is another creation of Tom and Brian's built on the same beach using plentiful flat limestone from the shore. Well done guys!

Row row rows of stones...

Brian Mulcahy and Tom Dolan, who were with me at the Clayton workshop last weekend, are a formidable team of wallers. They recently built this dry stone boat on the shores of the St lawrence near Cape Vincent, New York.

An Invitation to The Sculpture Forest

A Fitting Occasion

 

The pattern we used to build the walls in Clayton New York last weekend was loosely based on something I'd seen when I was in Mallorca at a Stone Symposium held back in 2007. 

It involves arranging the stones in a diamond grid. Be they trapezoids, parallelograms or even squares, they are all laid into the wall so that their faces are on the diagonal.

I was pleased with how well our group caught on to the technique and achieved such good fits, arranging the stones more like one would stack firewood rather than how you would lay blocks in a static horizontal grid. 

The crew worked merrily through two days of rain to produce an impressive dry stone seating wall for the newly developed Otter Creek Preserve where trails and lookout towers and bridges are being built to help visitors discover and enjoy the many acres of natural habitat there.

Blocky stones laid on the diagonal have a lot more grip. With time they even fit tighter. The walls are bookended with chunky immovable columns built in the conventional style to hold any diagonal pressure.

Thanks to the 1000 Islands Art Centre and the Thousand Island Land Trust  for sponsoring this event.

Thousand Islands Land Trust

Everything went swimmingly

The workshop 'sitting wall' at Clayton N Y is coming along 

quite well. Here's what it looked like at the end of yesterday. We decided to go with a kind of funky, very daring herringbone pattern. It was a challenge for new students, for sure. 

Rain, what rain?

Pink Granite

Here's the nice load of pink granite that was delivered yesterday for us to work with today at the Clayton N Y beginners dry stone walling across the border workshop. It came from a quarry not a mile away. As you can see it's all nice sizes, lovely shapes, right angles, flat faces - all waiting to be put into a dry stone structure which will be a curved wall seating area.The stones seem very friendly too. 

Everything looked like the workshop was going to go smoothly except …wait a minute. There was absolutely no hearting! Not one piece smaller than a chocolate box.
  
Luckily Jake made some calls and arranged for some of us to take a field trip to the quarry and gather bucket loads of hearting, loaded into the back of his pickup truck, enough small stuff to at least get started today. 

More hearting is promised to arrive by noon today. So were good!  Phew.

Hi and Dry ?

Flowerpot Island is an island in Georgian Bay, in the Ontario. It is a part of Fathom Five National Marine Park. The island  has a total area of 2 square kilometres (490 acres). The name of the island comes from two rock pillars on its eastern shore which look like flower pots. 

The natural flower pots are a type of sea stack, formed over many years as wind, rain, waves and ice hammered away at the cliff that once stood alongside the water’s edge.

The softer rock eroded more quickly, leaving the harder rock remaining in the shape of flowerpots with trees growing on top . 

The stone flowerpot in the sign is mortared and not 'naturally' formed ( not even even 'dry laid' I suspect ) but nevertheless is an imaginative structure to have been commissioned by the town to greet tourists to the area.

Sacred Land

Nearly ten years ago Farley and Claire Mowat donated their 200-acre waterfront property in River Bourgeois, Cape Breton to the Nova Scotia Nature Trust, along with a substantial endowment fund.
Farley said this gift was his way of settling up with the muse that had inspired his many books. 

“All we can do, having lived upon this planet, is to make some kind of repayment to life,” 

“Leaving my property in trust fulfills this need that I feel.”

Nova Scotia Nature Trust   http://nsnt.ca/aboutus/

Mary and I visited Claire at the property last week. 

There was a strong presence of Farley everywhere, especially in the stones. 

This 'hand-printed' silkscreen by Robert Rutherford ( a friend of the Mowat's) depicts the coastal property back in 2006
The beacon we built that year was to be a replica of the mysterious dry stone cairns that have been found (and sparsely documented) not only on Diana Island, off Quebec's Ugava Peninsula, but also along the coasts of Newfoundland and Labrador.
These ancient Canadian structures were brought to my attention when I first began reading Farley's book The Farfarers . It was this book too, that prompted us to build the dry stone boat structure (described later in his book) at the third annual Canadian Dry Stone Wall Festival in Port Hope.

Taking a Cool Break on Labour Day.

We laboured all labour day building walls at a favourite client's property yesterday. It was very hot. 

We took our breaks in the creek. 

The water was cool but we were still in direct sun. 

Dylan thought to duck under the shade of Judy's dry stone bridge there. 

Of all the cool things dry stone bridges are (both to build and to enjoy looking at) I'd never considered a bridge being a cool place to get under to be out of the heat of the sun.

Walnut 'Nut Wall'

Just practicing for the Amherst Dry Stone Festival children's 'Potato Wall' event.   ; )

A New Month

We need a extra month between August and September 
Thirty days to catchup, to look back and remember 

A month to do those things we left undone 
Because of the heat and the blistering sun

A parcel of time that helps wrap up the summer 
That stalls all the fall things and makes the season 'funner'

A space to relax in and fulfill desires
Before we start axing and building wood fires

Before closing up the cottage once more 

And putting all the water sport toys in store

Between fixing steps and mending walls 

Projects are cleaned up with out rushing at all

Our month of reprieve gives us time to discover
That after this new month we'll still need another. 

Client with a good sense of design.

It really helps to have a client with a good sense of design.

The inspiration for this beautiful curvy sedum-top dry stone project came from the property owner himself. After having taken a workshop I taught in Haliburton a couple years ago, he and I became good friends and later we collaborated taking several months to finalize the design for this flowing garden feature which we completed last year.

Wired together or Unwired

I took this photo in Halifax on Monday of a tree surrounded by two stone walls demonstrating two very different treatments of construction. The wall in the background is what's called a gabion wall. The stones are held together inside wire cages 

The foreground wall is a simply traditional dry laid wall. It utilizes stones held together by the virtue of the way they have been skillfully fitted together. 

The builder employs the elements of mass and friction and the unique shape of every stone to create a solid immovable wall. Which wall looks better? Which wall will not rust? Which wall has less manufactured material ? Which wall will require less work to repair?

Before and After

This is what the wall looked like on Friday.

And now it looks like this on Monday morning. Just needs a few more vertical copes.

À La Carte

 

The Lord Nelson Hotel let me use one of their baggage carts to move a few of the big rocks I'm bringing back with me from Halifax.

Dry stone walling across to Halifax N. S.

Smiling 'before shot'

Good bunch of guys I have rebuilding this wall at the Dalhousie University Dry Stone Walling Workshop. 

They are all smiling.

And that's a good sign.

Full Moon Lighting

Worked late under the light of the full moon last night. The Super Moon (of three that we will have this year) looked on as I finished the wall end, getting it ready for today's workshop at Dalhousie University.

Finally finished!

Shaun S. wrote to me a few days ago to say he took my weekend walling workshop in Inverary Ont in June 2011 and that he had finally completed his dry stone wall project he had started back then. 

His plan at that time was to build two 40 ft sections of wall using re-claimed
sandstone.

" I started the wall in the summer of 2012 and had it 95%done
last summer, but still needed to locate some nice field stone to top off my last section of wall. I finished the last 40 ft section today!

A brief history of the project: I removed the stone from a nearby foundation of an old house on the property adjacent to mine in Winchester. My brother owned the house and property and demolished the brick house after it was no longer inhabitable. I dug out the old stone from the foundation and removed it and stacked it for future use in the summer of 2007. I placed the wall along the private dirt roadway that I share with two other brothers, and the wall was built approximately 40 feet from the foundation of the old brick house. 

When I was digging out the foundation I located an old apothecary bottle
later dated to the 1870's.

I worked on the wall myself and logged 180 hours on both walls. I capped off the walls with nice field stone that had been tossed to the fence lines over the years. It took months to search out this final layer of decorative stones.

Thought I'd update you both on my project which is now FINISHED!!!

Cheers.

Shaun" 

Salvaged

Andrew G wrote to tell me he enjoyed the week-end workshop at Kingsmere and that he will wear his Dry Stone Walling Across Canada tee shirt with pride! 

 

He sent along images of part of the retaining wall he built in his backyard. 

The stones were from the Holy Trinty Church on Sherbrooke street in Montreal. The story of this church is a sad one:

''Holy Trinity was constructed in 1865 and for the first 60 years of its existence it was known as the Sherbrooke Street Methodist Church. 

The Greek Orthodox community bought the church in 1925 and it was gutted by a fire in January 1986. After the fire the Greek community raised money to rebuild it but the funds were diverted to other projects. It was demolished in 1997.''


The building and all the dimensional stones including dressed voussoirs, lintels and quoins were being trucked away to be crushed into gravel. Andrew came across the church being demolished one day as he was driving to work and had to some fast negotiating to be able to rescue over 60 tons of the material. He was able to use it in his sunken garden, after storing it for a couple years on his front lawn.

Andrew ended by writing "I guess a small consolation is that some of it was not turned into gravel."

On top of a stone foundation.

Here's a shot of most of the participants involved in second phase of the spiral staircase stone watch tower in Gualala.

Congratulations and a big hand to the stone women and stone men who did so well getting the vision to this stage. 

Mark and I (and a few others I'm sure) are really missing not being there for this second part of the build. Oh well, at least we will see most of you in January at the Symposium.

In need of repair.

I'm looking forward to instructing a training course here next weekend.  We will be restoring a 30 foot section of this important hundred year old dry stone wall in a major Canadian city.  Can you guess where it is?