Doing Permanent Damage

 I have always maintained that building a dry stone wall doesn't have to be a trade-off between beauty and sturdiness, and that both can be accomplished using even a random assortment of stones. It is possible to erect something that is built like a tank, but is a tank really beautiful. A wall, unless it is built in a war zone, doesn't have to look like a tank-barrier either, just the same way a house surely doesn't have to look like a bunker.

Like good art and much of life, restraint is the key. War is about excess. A wall built without restraint is a wall that wastes too many of the better sized and squarer flatter shaped stones. Such a wall demands that more and more 'recruits' come in and lay down their lives for the 'wall cause', which doesn't so much 'raise the standard' as raise the cost . 

"But" you say to yourself, "why spare any expense?" 

I suppose such a walling effort will appear to be a kind of heroic 'war effort'. If you are not in love with what you are doing, then your wall can be excessively blocky and dull, and you can call for throughstones to be inserted every other foot and use fairly unchallenging stones everywhere. It is no longer about being ecological or being frugal with what you have or even being creative, but it's about militarily 'securing' your position and establishing your dominance over a section of wall, even if it requires using a lot of pre-cut stuff from the pallet and anything else you secretly know is pretty hard to come by .

Yours becomes a pragmatic wall, the antithesis of art. You can pretend it is the 'Wall to End All Walls'. You can assure yourself that you haven't skimped on anything in a slavish commitment to permanence. But there is an obvious point where the beauty and spontaneity are lost. A wall like that might win the battle for lasting the longest or the prize for looking like you couldn't push it over with a tank, but it won't necessarily be is a 'handsome' wall, and in the end, ironically, it wont be a wall you will want to remember..

Over Blown

It may be difficult to describe the actual point where a project begins to exceed the well-founded structural (or design) requirements, but most of us recognize full blown overengineering when we see it.  ( obviously if we're talking about the modern gas powered leaf blower, then the quantum leap it makes from what was the perfectly good job that a rake can do, is quite obvious.

And yes, the answer to the question is – A dry stone wall can be over engineered.  

Such a structure can be ridiculously too thick, have unnecessarily tight fitting faces, have too many through stones, (or ones too over-sized) or that have all the stones sawn and/or completely fabricated and divested of their inherent character. The end result of over engineering is that the thing has an annoying overworked appearance, or worse, looks like someone was just trying to show off.

The next question is why does this happen. Why can something as simple and as time honoured a craft as dry stone walling still slip into that trap of becoming overengineered? Why is it not obvious that instead of being a logical, frugal, and uncomplicated way of building, it often compels those who practice the craft to outdo or overdo or overshoot what is needed or what has been done before?

What is the point du gard?

 

In the next couple of Thinking With My Hands entries I'd like to investigate the meaning of the question..."Can a dry stone wall be over engineered ?"

See you tomorrow

What do you connect with

All of us

Are looking 

To find a way of connecting.

We learn the principles of connection sometimes 

By experimenting putting things together.

Connecting them like stones in a wall

And we learn 

What works

And what doesn't.

And we make the connections.

And our wall takes on a pleasing form if is built right 

And reveals the beauty of connectivity.

And fittingly,

we and others 'connect' with what we see. 

Bucket List

We saw a lot of the things in France we wanted to see on our first Saturday off. Six of us crammed into the van and went off to explore The Pont du Gard and several dry stone Bories and Cabanes along the way. Everything was going well until the sliding door on the large van that Mark had rented got knocked off !  (Don't ask how)

After the initial shock and the resulting despair, we contemplated a grim scenario of us driving around the rest of the month without a door.  

We did manage to eventually get the door back on enough to continue our travels ( Sean Adcock used a rock as a hammer to smash the van latch back into position, and the duck tape I bought came in handy for sealing the iffy door partially shut)  

After that day's adventure,  our van was renamed The Bucket List,  since we knocked off several interesting things on that drive .

The Fresh Impressionists

 Nous Laissons Une Impression Durable

We don't just do it for the Monet. 

Monsieur Mark Ricard, 

Project Manager, @drystoneart, Marculeus

The man who made sure we made, not just dry stone art, but more importantly, a durable impression on the French landscape.

The “Walled” is my Cloister

I’m not cloister-phobic.
Nor am I agoraphobic.
But I am more of a fan of enclosure, 
Of feeling being walled-in.
The sense of place - being separate from all other places. 
Separate, protected, cozy, containing everything I need in order to thrive. 
I suffer from FOMO, and so to counteract the uncomfortableness of having too many choices, I choose to limit my self to what is nearest, convenient, more freely provided.
That which lies within my garden view, to complete my outdoor ‘rooms with a view’ .
What local stones are there around, to be used, or reused, or locally found? Can I work from the inside out ? Reaching over the wall, would be tricky no doubt. Or , if I worked from the outside in, behind me I’d cover any opening .
My cloister is a concentric series of cells, dry laid, self-contained, and all made quite well

Enclosures of joy, circling closer and closer. Rings within rings of cosmic attraction.
It can be round or square, well-furnished or bare, rustic or formal , uncommon or normal, a place of restraint, a ring of protection, no sense of stagnation , just peace and reflection .
What folly is this, what madness imagined , a fantasy walled , without the distraction? A containment , a border , prescribing the edges , made from the fieldstones found in the hedges. 
Brimming and Rimming with tons of material, to create a sure haven to frame the ethereal. 

Painting by @janegifford1

Choice Stones

The stones on the shore are all at various stages of completion.

Some have not yet become fully rounded .

Some are still too big. Most of them are at the uninteresting stage. 

Other candidates have holes started in them but the holes don't yet go through to the other side .

They will be ready in a couple more years. 

However a few stones along my beach walk are close to perfect,  both in shape and smoothness  - tumbled by the ocean and then cleverly left lying on the beach, waiting to catch my attention and then pick them up. 

One candidate will stay in my hand as I walk,

my fingers exploring it's perfect smooth contours and colour, as I look for others, equally perfect in uniqueness. 

There is no rush. No agenda. 

My eyes go into neutral looking for these singular stones to bring home .

My focus is on nothing, in order to see the stones that are really something .

I bring back a dozen or so in my pockets every time I visit the beach 

If I came here an infinite number of times , the sea no doubt , would have completed her timeless task of tumbling every single one of her stones into works of art and I will have had no choice but to have eventually chosen the entire shore of perfectly formed stones to carry back home with me .

On not knowing the Bories stories

 

Coming across the remains of corbeled roofed (faux vault) dry laid stone shelters while working in France this winter was an inexplicably rewarding experience. There is a tantalizing mystery surrounding all these vernacular edifices which continues to linger long after you visit the Village of the Bories at Gordes in Vaucluse. 

Augmenting this sense of delightful ‘unknowing’ is the fact that many of these rustic Bories or Cabanes seem to disguise themselves so well amidst the cedars and irregular rocky terrain we were exploring. It’s was as though they were playing a game of hide and seek with us. We stumbled upon one or two nestled into the landscape that only minutes ago we had walked by without seeing, on the winding double walled path we were following outside the actual village.

My heart was content to not know what my brain was needing to understand. What does it matter that you don’t know the why the when or the how? Finding these domed dwellings dotted over the rugged french countryside was a bit like finding curious looking shells on the beach. The lives of the inhabitants of the stoney huts we were exploring, their stories, their comings and goings, much like the sea creatures long gone from the shells they leave behind, are narratives we willingly allow to remain unimportant in comparison to the delight of discovering their beautiful abandoned crusty remains lying for the most part undisturbed by time and in uninhabited places. 

These strange hollow 'dry stone' shells, unlike other crustaceans, are too big to pick up carry home in our pockets, but we take consolation in being able to take home many of our own personal impressions, and of course myriads of photos, to remind us of this enchanted place where these unusual limestone dwellings are gathered and seem to just bubble up to the surface. 

The Van 'Go Between'

Between the essential and the fabricated,

Between pure Artistic Expression and imitation Artificial Intelligence,

Somewhere between these opposing influences there has to be opportunity to still be surprisingly creative.

Those of us who are looking to bring the art of walling back to earth again, continue to explore this middle road some call the Stone Zone.

Our desire is not just to fit stone's randomness into cute pleasing patterns, but help realize the improbable and the unpredictable.

In order to eliminate the unnatural elements of commercialism, and avoid the contrived manmade over-engineered look, we must steer our way around a digitalized reality that has represented a false concept of ‘virtual.’

We want to explore all stone's potential in this area, and not continue to replicate the predictably obvious. 

If you enjoy the art of stone and hope to keep discovering the painterly/creative side of walling, if you like originality, not conformity, if you like your impressions to be real, that is, not contrived, diminished, filtered or visually manipulated, allow me to introduce you to the van Go Between

Somewhere between the pristine environment of priceless masterpieces (that few can afford), and the drab world of cheap reproductions that are neither natural, nor genuinely inspired , the ‘Go Between’ van turns out to be the ideal vehicle for still travelling creatively between the two worlds.

The walling game

It was 2011, in Inisheer, that Patrick McAfee and I first kicked around the idea of developing a board game that incorporated the principles of dry stone walling. Just recently I had more opportunity to create an actual playable version of the game, based on ideas BEM Sean Adcock and I discussed over dinner, while we were in France with several other skilled wallers doing a project near Nice. 

I suppose it might seem a bit obsessive, after having worked all day building walls with odd shaped stones, that anyone would want to amuse themselves at night doing the same thing with random cutout shapes of cardboard. But there it is. 

We experimented with various versions of the game. The one in the photo involved replicating an Irish wedge wall. The rules were purposely kept simple. Each player picked out 5 pieces of about 100 cardboard shapes I'd previously cut out and placed in a bag so that no one knew what they were getting. A turn consisted of playing a piece on the table and picking a new piece from the bag until all the pieces were used. You weren't allowed to see the opponents pieces. 

Shapes put down by a player had to be placed in a vertical orientation and had to touch at least two other cardboard 'stones'. A point was scored if you could fit a piece down so that it was touching three other stones. Two points scored if you could fit a shape so that it touched four stones, and so on. 

There was a lot of other rules we considered and a lot of ideas played around with to make the game less dependant on having an arbitrator or "what have you" to determine whether pieces were on the proper vertical axis or actually touching its three neighbours.

The game still needs developing and the rules of the game definitely needs improving because Sean was winning most of the games I played him.

Can it be done?

 -

. ' \

 I have been accused of seeing everything through rock coloured glasses.

Well I do. It's usually a good thing, except for all the scratchy lichen and the uncomfortably rough furniture.

Here's what I see, before and after I put my glasses on.

A ‘Seanism’

 .

L '

One of the things Sean Adcock liked to say in that classic cockney voice of his, if you’d put a stone in the wall that wasn’t right, was, “I don’t think you’re going to like that one later”.

It seemed a gentler way of correcting a person by letting them  imagine themselves seeing their mistake in the future! 

Can you see any stones in this wall that you might not be happy with later?

More about Sean

 

Photograph by Christa Gallo Mona

Here's more about Sean Adcock written by  clare.howcutt-…posted in the Stone Specialist.

Sean Adcock, a Dry Stone Walling Association Master Craftsman has been awarded a British Empire Medal (BEM) for services to dry stone walling. Adcock is the six-time North Wales Professional Champion in dry stone walling and has taught students across the world, undertaken large-scale projects (including a temple in California https://thinking-stoneman.blogspot.com/2022/03/the-accumulative-connection.html?m=0 ) in addition to writing a number of books and producing technical guides on the subject.

Adcock who earned a degree in Modern History and Politics in the 1980s, has been a waller for 35 years after initially taking a year off after university to join a conservation volunteer project. 

Congratulations to you, Sean Adcock. You deserve it!

 

Sean Adcock – Medallist of the Order of the British Empire (BEM)

A six-time North Wales professional champion in dry stone walling, Caernarfon-based master craftsman Sean has been awarded a BEM for “services to dry stone walling”.

He said: "It came as a complete surprise - but I suppose everyone says that! 

"My partner had seen the envelope and was urging me to open it - I was more interested in the DIY parcels that had arrived; I didn't even notice 'The Cabinet Office' on the envelope, and probably I wouldn't have twigged even if I had!   

"I'm amazed that enough people nominated me, and even more amazed that The Honours Committee thought the nomination worthy of something. 

"I'm certain there are others in the area more deserving than myself but haven't been fortunate enough to have been nominated in the first place. 

"I still think I'm dreaming and waiting for someone to reveal it's all a joke!"

This article appeared in the 30th of December 2023 edition of The Journal

Dancing Over Danger

The dance of life involves risk.

Taking a risk often means engaging in some perceived, but not necessarily real , danger.

The real danger may often be not taking the risk. The folly is that we imagine life’s problems as being not there to dance over. We are constrained, often crippled, when confronted by the proverbial ‘manhole cover’ . We say to ourselves  “ Oh oh, that says danger. I better not walk on it , and I certainly shouldn’t dance over it”

So...

Let's let all the risky ‘newness’ of 2024 free the dancer within. 

Shiprock

 If you walk far enough along the shore of Lake Ontario where we live, you come to a long section of a crumbly cliff made up of many loose chunks of rugged weathered limestone 

It's looks like it was all dumped there from above where the railway line comes troublingly close to the cliff edge. Perhaps train loads of rocks were tipped over the lake side in an attempt to shore up the shore . In any case the area below makes a great place to experiment with different building methods and/or just playing with stone ideas. You just have to be careful not to cause an avalanche !

This is where the germ of the 'the dry stone ship crashed into the shore'( or perhaps less violently,  ' the ship run aground ') idea came to me. 

I'd been trying out different techniques for building the cocoon installation I had been starting to think about doing sometime around January 2021. The opening I had now started to dig into the side of the cold rocky cliff supplied me with lots of stones to then build up the sides .

The resulting shape began to look less and less oval looking ( cocoon-like ?) and more pointed , more like a gothic portal opening, or maybe a ship's prow. 

I built into the cliff as far as I dared and extended the walls of the boat shaped opening with the newly acquired stones, towards the water's edge. The resulting space provided a shelter from the wind and a comfortable resting place.  This playful shore project was the beginnings of thinking about designing (and building permanently) not just a cocoon now  but rather some kind of boat shaped dry stone portal thing .  Craig and Brian came back with me later in February to add more stones to the gunnels and then sit comfortably out of the cold wind while I took a photo.

To be continued 

Mimecraft

About fifty students from the local Bobcaygeon public school were invited yesterday to visit the historic dry stone restoration work we've been doing at Case Manor.  I wondered how I might plug into their world and do a bit of a comparison. It occurred to me I might get their attention by asking if any of them played Minecraft . Just about all of them raised their hand. 

 I pointed out that building dry stone walls is like building real walls, and maybe even more fun, than making pretend blocky things in the digital world of Minecraft. By the surprised look on their faces, I think that idea had never occurred to them.

 They were totally on board ( and not bored ) from then on. They asked questions and watched inquisitively as we discussed things like  throughstones , hearting and the merits of building with gathered random chunks of local limestone, instead of newly manufactured stuff ( or virtually generated modules) 

 .

Amazing Stone Feetwork

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. ' '

This is not the usual hands-on dry stone stuff. No. This time it’s a ‘feets-on’ experience.  And what a curious complexity of sensations it is, as the feeling is transmitted up through the feet shuffling across a floor of loose pebbles. This tingly tactile feeling , usually only experienced walking barefoot along a stoney beach, has been somewhat replicated inside the Temple of Imperfections, where several wheelbarrow loads of flattish beach pebbles have been laid down in a thin layer, across the concrete surface of the floor. The choice of having the pebbles spread loosely around, in no fixed arrangement, was a departure from the fixed spiralling pattern usually associated with pebble work laid in cement.  The pebbles can still be played with , and attractive patterns can be created by those who enter the temple , but it's the ‘foot-feely’ pleasure of walking over  loose stones that becomes the most attractive part of the unconventional floor treatment we decided upon in the end . I was delighted to hear the positive account of a chiropodist, who told some fellow barefoot bystanders inside the temple, after entering the structure barefoot during the StoneZone open house tour last winter, that the activity of walking on such a 'beach-like' floor would definitely be of great therapeutical benefit.

‘Look Mom. No hands!’

A talented participator the day people were invited to see the temple (barefoot) enjoyed doing some fancy footwork during his visit

Amada Stinson did this lovely arrangement, after everyone left.

R

A Glimpse Down Inside the Dome Through the Oculus

 

The Oculus Man

Super talented stone mason and all round wonderful person, Matt Driscol was the man given the job of creating an oculus out of stone, actually two of them, ( avoiding the plural ) for the opening over the top of the dome.  

The process involved carefully drilling many holes around the circumference in a 24 inch diameter circle in a large flagstone slab of mica schist, and then chiselling and hammering ( disconnecting the dots? ) to eventually dislodge a fully intact circle of stone, and thus thereby creating the round opening in the slab we needed for the dome. 

We decided on a second oculus, which he cut out the same way, but first drilled and cut a smaller circumference circle, and then drilled and cut out the final 24 inch ring dimension from that ( you can see the resulting bonus ring of stone hanging on the tree on the right )

The first oculus was hoisted up (via the Gradal) and then lifted by hand over top of the a course of random stone 'tiles' around the roof opening and then, after fitting the final course of (pre-shaped) stones over and around the first oculus, the second oculus was then lifted gently over the top of everything. , creating  a kind of semi-watertight seal, and a beautiful finish to the Temple of Imperfections

The Corbeling Process

 

High up in the Sun Roof of the Temple of Imperfections

 

Here's what the opening of the dome looked like when the neighbours came to inspect the construction that had gone on so far. This was just before the two large oculus stones were added to the roof. Rich and Nancy had climbed all the way up the interior wooden scaffolding, and didn't carry any stones with them for us to help finish the roof. That's okay. They were suitably impressed.

Closing in over the dome opening

 

As you can see, the guys standing on the stones already laid over the dome of the Temple of Imperfections are rather nonchalantly perched over a black hole. There was a palatable sense of excitement for everyone as these stones went on. Mark Ricard, was inside the 'hole', carefully helping place the one or two rows of  'preshaped' corbel stones around the opening. You can see how dramatic this latter stage of the dome construction was. 

To spiral or not to spiral

As we built up on the inside of the dome of the Temple of Imperfection Mark noticed a discrepancy in height across the circumference of the courses. We wondered if we had been building in a spiral . 

As we followed our eyes around the top stones it was surprisingly difficult to decide.  It turned out it wasn't a spiral, but it did get us wondering about morphing the coursing at this phase of the coursing of the dome, into a spiral

The spiral has the advantage of not having to do that kind of 'last stone' fitting on each row. The stones are merely added one by one, and next to each other, never leaving any gaps to fill at the joining of each circle

But is it as strong? That is the question.

In the end we decided to continue with circular coursing. We laid the stones along the uneven course, gradually getting thicker, to raise the lower side of the circle , and gradually lower on the other side of the circle, to bring the stonework to level.

Proper Noise Cancelling

 

At the stage where the actual construction of the dry stone dome was to begin, it was decided that to reduce the amount of noise on the job, we would refrain from using any type of machinery including electric and gas powered tools for the duration of the project . It also meant there would be no noise from air compressors or generators on site either.

It's troubling how often we masons are tempted to resort to these instruments of mass construction. How often do we say let's just saw it or grind it because it's faster, when really, there is so little masonry skill expended using the quick and dirty way of doing things and no real meaningful hand-tooling or sympathetic contact with the material.

There is far less need to respect the unique nuances of the stone when you have a saw in your hand instead of just a hammer and chisel. There's less call for creativity, less problem solving , less need to ever fully know your material .

As long as you don't mind the dust, and the noise, and all the other mechanical aspects that can complicate the simple shaping of stones, you can just plow thru a project and not really experience much of what traditional masonry is all about. 

But at this stage it seemed more prudent to experience the quiet non-obtrusive sound of stones being shaped with only hand tools.

It meant too, that a minimum of shaping go on, and that the stones, as much as possible, be fitted into the dome using them  as they come in their natural shapes . We wanted to be able to talk and hear each other as we worked, to maybe listen to the same music while we built the dome, instead of each of us being in our tiny individual noise cancelling cells, insulated from everyone and everything . 

There are a passage in bible scripture where the building of Solomon's temple is described. It basically says the noise of stones being shaped was not to be heard near where the temple was being built.. 

In another reference in Exodus 20:25 it says -  Now if you make an altar of stones for Me, you must not build it with stones shaped by tools; for if you use a chisel on it, you will defile it.

While we were going to have to use some hand tools, not using power tools still felt (at least on this our Temple of Imperfections project) like a more respectful, less frenzied way to proceed.

The inner dome shape starts to take shape.

Here's a look at what the coursing of stones stepping around the temple looks like, as I'm standing on the edge.

You can just see the black band of granite that is already 'stepped out' below the dozen or so courses forming the beginning of the dome. The combination of the corbeling above that band, and the darker area of corbeling below that, (part of the curved lower wall) comes to just over twelve inches of 'overhang', already.  

That leaves about 15 more horizontal feet of corbeling to go to stretch to the middle. It's best, however, to start being careful not to step too near the edge already.