Jason Hoffman wrote me recently about a new contraption he is very happy to have on the job.
"Sometimes you’ve just got to go mechanical on your stone. I am a purist and much prefer to use hammers and chisels to shape my walling stone. However, when your quarried sandstone cracks in unexpected ways when you try and shape it, you need to act. When the huge pieces explode when a sledge hammer is used, you need a new tack. When working the stone with hammer and chisels produces more hearting and waste than usable stone, then its time. It’s time to get mechanical.
This petrol driven stone cropper is the business. The two hydraulic rams produce 80 tonnes of pressure on the stone, which is gently pressed between the blade and a raised edge on the base. The stone is eased apart rather than cut – big pieces make a satisfying “crack” when they split. As the pressure is so concentrated, the stone doesn’t shatter, and in most cases produces a clean break. And it comes with a tow bar, so you can move it from job to job.
The enclosure needs the original ground level to be first dug about 8 inches deeper (to remove weedy roots and poor soil) and then the it is lined with landscape fabric.
Then two trailer loads ( 8 yards ) of triple mix is added to bring the level up two feet to make it a slightly 'raised' garden.
Now that the soil has been added, the front wall and gate opening will soon be built.
But first wheelbarrows of our fall leaves are scattered into the enclosure.
And the lawnmower does a nice shredding job. The walls do a good job of containing the newly shredded leaf mulch
The hardest job now is waiting for spring to start planting in the new garden.
It feels very satisfying to carve out a little bit of the bush and enclose an area with stone to create a garden. There is something primal, something essentially purposeful about it.
The walls will probably not keep out many vegetable eating predators but it still feels like the things that we grow here will do better than the small garden we presently use nearer the house. It never yielded very much. It seemed frail and exposed.
The granite cope stones of this new garden area stand upright like sentries guarding against some unnamed foe. Each one I lift on to the wall has years of experience waiting and watching. In fact all these glacial stones have done their time patrolling the hedgerows and perimeters of long established farm fields that have produced many seasons of crops and provided pasture for herds of livestock.
These stones know what they are doing here. They bring a purposefulness to the garden.
It is not difficult to imagine whatever we grow here will pick up that energy.
Rick Merecer said " This is one of my best days ever" And I say, Well done Dry Stone Canada, and all you guys from Ireland and the States (and Scotland) and thanks to all the lovely people we met on Amherst Island! Thank you especially Andrea. This was one of my best weekends ever.
I'm working alone on this latest raised garden project. ( My dog Farley is good company but he's lazy ) I find walling alone on a quiet job site can be a good opportunity to listen to music too. I like to meditate on the relationship between music and being creative with stone. When you think about it too, NOTES are just STONE spelled backwards from the inside out.
Image captionRefugees and asylum seekers have been learning preservation skills in County Down's Mourne area
"I'm here to help my new friends to build a big wall, like the Chinese wall."
Zipping up a thick jacket and pulling on a pair of gloves, Mohammed is ready for a hard day's graft.
He is one of a number of refugees and asylum seekers living in Belfast who spend their spare time doing voluntary conservation and preservation work in the Mourne mountains in County Down.
In Algeria, his home country, he was a police officer, but "problems with my government and a terrorist group" forced him to flee.
Image captionDry-stone walls stretch over mountain summits and down through valleys in the Mournes
He has been in Northern Ireland for 18 months now - it is his "new home".
These mountains are where Mohammed and others displaced from their homelands come regularly to find peace.
Generations
They are working with the Mourne Heritage Trust, which looks after this area of outstanding natural beauty, to rebuild dry-stone walls and repair mountain paths.
The walls are one of the most unmistakable features of the Mournes, with hundreds of miles stretching over mountain peaks, dividing land and providing shelter for livestock and other wildlife.
Image captionHundreds of thousands of hikers visit the Mourne area to walk in the mountains every year
The skills to build them - patience, an eye for a good stone, and a strong back, among other things - have been passed down through generations.
And now these refugees are learning them, too.
For Mohammed, this is his first time working on the walls: "I think it's very good experience for me."
Anxieties
With about 100 Syrian refugees expected to arrive in Northern Ireland before Christmas, the volunteer scheme could soon play a bigger role in offering a tranquil retreat to more people who have left conflict-hit countries.
Image captionMourne Heritage Trust workers teach the volunteers the skills needed to repair the walls
Mediation Northern Ireland is one of the charities helping refugees and asylum seekers to settle into their new lives.
Mary McAnulty from the organisation says it works closely with the Mourne Heritage Trust.
The intention has been to help the refugees to make new friends, improve their language skills and explore part the country they now call home.
"Lots of people suffer from anxieties, so having a day out of Belfast is great," Mary says.
Image captionMany of the walls in the Mournes were built over a century ago by people from the area
"If your world is very small, just the area you live in, then these can be your hills.
"I love to see people becoming proud of it and feeling that they have a sense of place."
Indebted
Amar, who has moved to Belfast with his family from Sudan, says getting outside the city "is good for me".
And for Elizabeth, who is Colombian, the fresh countryside air is "good for my mind".
Image captionMohammed (left) and Amar (right) say time spent in the Mournes is a welcome break from city life
But it is not just a one-way thing.
Large areas of walls have become damaged due to erosion and increasing visitor numbers, and the Mourne Heritage Trust relies on volunteers to do the repair work.
Ranger John McEvoy says the trust is indebted to the refugees.
Smile
"They're willing to get the sleeves rolled up, get stuck into it," he explains.
"As the day goes on, you'll see them lifting the stone, doing exactly as we're doing."
Image copyrightAlan WhitcroftImage captionAt the end of the day's work, the volunteers take pride in the mark they have made on the Mournes
And Dean Fitzpatrick, a Mourne man who comes from a family of stoneworkers, says you do not have to be born and bred in the shadow of the mountains to chip in.
"There are boys here who aren't stonemasons at all, from all different parts of the world," he says.
"They're doing as good as anybody and they've only been here an hour or two."
As Mohammed removes his gloves and wipes his brow after the work is done, his smile is wide.
"Here it's very quiet - everything is perfect for me here."
Got a heads up last night from a friend that on Tuesday evening November 3rd & Friday November 6th - on the Rick Mercer Report - CBC will be airing some of the footage they filmed at the Irish-Canadian Dry Stone Festival last October. I'm guessing all these 'kids' will be in it.
It will be a real 'trick' this Halloween to push back the shadow an hour, but then again having that extra hour of sleep Sunday morning will be a nice 'treat'.
Stone is always a big factor when it comes to our perceiving whether a certain location has a 'sense of place' or not. Often old ruins particularly trigger feelings associated with permanence, even though they are in a state of decay. They seem to provide a more solid frame of reference for meditating on the relationship between decay and permanence.
Even though so much of our existence is in flux, somehow coming across stone structures (like the remains of this old squared granite house I discovered still standing near Roseneath Ontario) allow us to feel more grounded.
'Sense of place' - We intuitively know what it is, and often sense it, but can we explain what it is, or say why certain places have it and others don't ?
Dry stone wall borders traditionally were built to try to keep livestock in and wildlife out. Nowadays we have a special sign put up everywhere, as a kind of skate border deterrent as well. But the wild life still gets over it.
Different examples of split rail fences are seen all over Ontario. They were very practical and less work than building stone walls to enclose tracts of land especially on properties where the there was more wood than stone. The traditional two post method isn't used in cases where the ground is too rocky, or the bedrock too close to the surface to dig post holes. The tripod becomes the support for the rails to wedge down onto (or hang from with wires). Sometimes the tripod was four posted (quadpod?) for greater strength. While the tripods create good vertical support than are still susceptible to sliding or even tipping. To prevent this, heavy rocks are sometimes placed on the upper "V"crotch of each tripod to add extra weight and cause the feet of the tripod to spread even more, creating a wider stable base. It is interesting that even where there is a lot of wood available and wooden fencing has been chosen over stone fencing, rocks still play an important role.
CBC NewsPosted: Oct 20, 2015 3:50 PM ATLast Updated: Oct 20, 2015 4:07 PM AT The photo on the left shows the Long Island sea arch before it collapsed overnight Monday. The one on the right shows Long Island minus its sea arch. (Michel Lajoie (left)/ Harold Nesbitt (right))
A Nova Scotia landmark was vandalized last Monday night when the well known trouble maker Mother Nature caused the collapse of the sea arch 'the hole' on Long Island in the Minas Basin. Residents of the area are continually looking for ways to prevent this kind of senseless destruction by weather and time. "Implementing stricter surveillance systems and enforcing heftier penalties just isn't working." says one local I guess we will just have organize a group of wallers to go over there and fix it for them.
John Henry mailed out invitations this year again to attend his special Halloween extravaganza on his property in Virginia. The link below is a video of his showing some of the dry stone projects he's built there, including one or two I was able to help with.
Canada has just had a federal election. There were many people who made it clear (especially on social media) that they were for "anyone except Harper" (Harper being the incumbent Prime Minister for the last nine years.)
There is an underlying problem with this type of thinking in that all the people who felt Harper was unfit for the job might not have been as unified a force. Though it was clearly not the case last night, the clout of a mass of people who were agreed on one thing, to get Harper out, could have been severely minimized, had their collective choice not been so decidedly Liberal.
It seems to me a better form of democracy would be to have people vote for the person they would least like to see in power. Every vote would count as a strike against the candidate, and the one with the least votes would clearly be the winner. That person would be seen as a true representative of the masses and someone who is least likely to do a terrible job.
This kind of contra democracy or inverse democracy goes on all the time in nature. Natural selection ensures that species naturally see to it that they get rid of the worst mutations.
If it's one vote we have as a species, or a nation, it is more effective to be a vote to get rid of the problem, than have our vote be no more than a longing for something better, which in the end is dissipated and neutralized by our lack of agreement as to who or what that would be.
If I am building a wall there is a natural selection (natural election?) constantly going on too. I pick one stone at a time. I may think that I am voting for the stone I want, but really I am voting for ( voting against?) the stones I don't want. When I get to the wall and it's not the right one, I throw it away too. I don't have my preferences for just one good stone dispersed amongst the decisions of a lot of other 'selves'.
If a committee is building a wall, even then the best stone for each job (of filling a gap or crossing a joint) would always turn out to be the one the least number of people objected to.
Walling so often turns out to be a life lesson in common sense. If I see a stone in the wall I don't like, I get rid of it. I intuitively decide that there must be a better one. There may in fact be two or three better ones. But first I vote to get the wrong one out.
David Allen of Stone Point Studio never ceases to amaze me with his unique brand of stone balancing.
This recent full-circle dry-laid prototype of Davd's is now my favourite. Interestingly it solves a problem I was working on a couple of years ago. wheels without mortar
Well done David !
You can read what he has to say about this ground breaking solution to the non-mortared no-shouldered stone moongate challenge on his Facebook page https://www.facebook.com/stonepointstudio And you can see more of his cleverly photographed work there too. I first became familiar with his work some years ago on Instagram where he displays (on an almost daily basis) an inspiring array of stone creations he dreams up and then accomplishes. Many of his pieces seem absolutely impossible. On visiting his website I was pleased to see that he posted a YouTube showing the process of him successfully balancing one collection of five irregular shaped stones. I would love to see how he does some of the other amazing 'balances'. The ones I like particularly are the dry stone moongates which form magical looking circle,square,diamond and heart shape openings.
Are you tired of clients snooping around on the job, after you've gone for the day (before your finished their project) checking out your workmanship ?
Are you annoyed they use your tools to see if your stone coursing is level?
Get the new 'Self Leveller' Level and merely leave it on the job after you go home for the day.
No matter where the client places it, your stonework will always appear to be level !
Priced at only $69.99 this is a deal not to be missed!
Act Now ! And buy this remarkable reputation-saving device today and we will throw in the new Joint 'Disguiser' which makes 'running joints' seem to disappear on photos of your work posted on Facebook and any masonry groups you show your work on.
I was very proud to see that on Sunday Sept 27th the Ennismore and District Horticultural Society completed their Dry Stone Wall project building a wall at base to the Welcome to Ennismore sign --It was a big job! Barry Sweeting did a wonderful job supervising the project and they say he gave a big sigh of relief once it was done. They changed thedesign somewhat from the original dry stone wall with an arch idea, even though they had some practice at building an arch on the previous community project which I had the honour of overseeing last year. A big well done to Bill Brouwer, Paul Young, Gail Murray/Smith, and the folks that helped clean up the rock-Gary Smith, Paul Young and John and Jack Young.
