An Irish Welcome

Having just arrived in Toronto, Patrick had a bit of a puzzled look on his face, as he watched me pull in to scoop him up at the airport yesterday evening.

I had spent the day driving up near Shelburne in potato country. I had timed it so I could get the two tons of potatoes  we needed for this weekend's children's event, and then swing by the airport, with the trailer load, and pick him up too.  

I figured he'd appreciate the great effort we've all taken to infuse this year's festival with a distinctly Irish theme.

Amherst Festival Update

Patrick McAfee, Norman Haddow, Sunny Wieler, Ken Curran, Tracy Mahaffey, Karin Sprague, Phillipe Smith, Danny Barber, Alexandra Morosco, Jake Murray, Jason Hoffman, John Scott, Scott George, Dan Pearl, Christopher Barclay and many other professional wallers and stone artisans from around the world will be there at the 2015 Irish-Canadian Dry Stone Festival on Amherst Island this weekend, starting on Friday September 25th   

Rick Mercer will be coming to the festival on Saturday too.The Minister of Tourism, Culture and Sport, Hon. Michael Coteau will be coming to the event on Saturday as well.  The Irish Ambassador - Dr. Ray Bassett will be there with his wife Patricia and Jane Urquhart will also be there.  The Irish Ambassador intends on being there both Saturday and Sunday. 

And the music will be awesome!  ….with special musical guests Seventh Town, The O'shraves and Turpin's Trail to name a few of the groups performing.

Unveiling in the Rain

Last Saturday we were pleased to attend the ceremonial unveiling of the newest addition to the Haliburton Sculpture Forest. It was very rainy but everyone was in good spirits and the grass atop this dry stone feature the students and I built last July got a good watering.

Jim Blake curator of the Haliburton Sculpture Forest said a few words to introduced the sculpture.— at Haliburton Sculpture Forest.

Barb Bolin, chair of the board, spoke about the history of the Sculpture Forest and thanked all those involved.

Murray Fearey, Reeve of the municipality of Dysart et al attended the ceremony

Members of the board helped unveil the new sculpture.

The Haliburton Sculpture Forest is a unique outdoor collection of sculptures located in Glebe Park near the village of Haliburton, Ontario, Canada. It is operated by the non-profit organization Haliburton Sculpture Forest et al.

Vote Where to Move the Boat

THE FARLEY MOWAT BOAT ROOFED HOUSE RELOCATION – Public Comment Opportunity

 

The Farley Mowat Boat Roofed House is currently located at 20 Catherine Street in Port Hope and is considered the largest monument dedicated to Farley Mowat in the world.

 

Council authorized the donation of the monument from the current owner to the Municipality. The Parks Recreation and Culture Advisory Committee presented two potential locations to Council for consideration of the relocation of the boat roofed house.

 

The two locations are now being presented to the Public for comment and feedback from September 21st to October 5, 2015 in order to determine the.  After the public consultation process, a follow-up report will be presented to Committee of the Whole on October 20, 2015 with a recommendation of a site for the Farley Mowat Boat Roofed House monument. The recommended sites are:

 

            1.  Riverside Park; or

            2.  Eastside Ganaraska Park.

 

Comments sheets are attached for download and are also available in hard copy at the Jack Burger Sports Complex, Town Park Recreation Centre, Ruth Clarke Activity Centre, Canton Municipal Building, Port Hope and Garden Hill Public Libraries and the Port Hope Town Hall.

 

Comment sheets can be emailed to rvorsteveld@porthope.ca or can be dropped off at the above locations.

 

 

Eastside Ganaraska Park across the river from the Port Hope Public Library Within Circle at Riverside Park (north side) on Mill St South across from the Ruth Clarke Activity Centre  COMMENT SHEET Farley Mowat Boat Roofed House Relocation Recommended locations for the relocation of the monument are: Riverside Park; or   Eastside Ganaraska Park Name: ________________________________________________________________________________ Address: ______________________________________________________________________________ Phone:  ________________________ Email: _____________________________________________ Please provide your comments below. If you require more space please use attach additional sheets. ________________________________________________________________________________________ ________________________________________________________________________________________ ________________________________________________________________________________________ ________________________________________________________________________________________ ________________________________________________________________________________________ ________________________________________________________________________________________ ________________________________________________________________________________________ ________________________________________________________________________________________ ________________________________________________________________________________________ ________________________________________________________________________________________ Please return your completed form to locations listed on the information sheet or by email at rvorsteveld@porthope.ca no later than Monday October 5, 2015 at 4:30 pm.  Any questions may be directed to Jim McCormack, Acting Director of Parks, Recreation and Culture, 284 Victoria Street North, Port Hope, tel: 905-885-8760 x 4108 or by email at: jmccormack@porthope.ca.

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.