I have got to hand it to her.

Looking back on a really successful dry stone festival this year I am reminded of what a great job everyone did. The musicians the people who prepared all the food, the wallers, all the people who opened up their homes to our guests from other countries, our presenters, the people who ran the booths and the staff at Landon Bay Park all did a spectacular job.

The person who I would most like to thank is my wonderful wife who spent hours and hours and days and days coordinating and planning, answering emails getting people involved and keeping things on track so that this festival could happen. She was not only a constant encouragement but a beacon of wisdom when it came to figuring out all the tiny details of running something as huge as a four day international event involving hundreds of people. I would have forgotten a lot of things leading up to Rocktoberfest if it were not for her. And then even during the festival she covered so many areas I couldn't have seen to.

I had the fun overseeing the building of Kay's Bridge, the main event of the festival. I could not be many other places. Mary covered all the other bases and was the glue that kept things together. Actually I think she created another bridge, a kind of connectivity between so many of our friends and participants and new acquaintances so that they all felt at home while they were with us at Landon Park. Through her they became a part of the greater DSWAC family.

Anyway, I don't know what I would have done without her. I have jokingly said in the past, to anyone who asked me why we always run this event on the Canada Thanksgiving holiday, that Rocktoberfest is held that weekend to dissuade those who put family before dry stone walling. That's not really true, and as on every other year, I was happy to have my wife along side me again this year at the festival, and pleased that family and dry stone walling don't have to be mutually exclusive .

Blister dress-up.

On the same two days as the beginner's workshop at Brockport NY which was held last weekend, other students, who took last year's course, worked together on a dry stone arch on the same property. Jon Ehrmantraut and Dan Pearl worked on a lot of it and Scott George helped build this lovely gothic arch entranceway between the two turf-topped walls (built previously) that bordered the west side of Sara's Garden Centre.

In between helping Norman Haddow teach the students on the beginner's wall (which you can see through the opening in the photo above) I was able to come over occasionally and help out on the arch too. Kathy and Steve who run the centre have many pallets of stone and piles of interesting rocks to choose from which we found useful when it came to looking for material for the arch. It's like a grocery store for masons.

We found some big chunky voussoirs and a lovely huge stone that I shaped for the diamond shaped keystone. It took quite a bit of chiseling, (which generally I don't do a lot of when I'm building dry stone walls) to dress the stone to make it into the correct V-shape for the top of the arch.

I have a new blister on my hand now to show for it .

'Hand' Rails

We used the same handrail design for the Rocktoberfest bridge last Thanksgiving as we did at the Macdougall public bridge which we built in Russell Ontario last year. The idea was something Scott Cluett came up with to solve the problem of not using up valuable bridge width with stone copes or parapets. Having the handrails secured beyond the 6 foot wide bridge surface gives ample room for two people to walk on the bridge side by side.

After I went over the final shape and dimensions with him, Scott who is a part time blacksmith ended up fabricating the metal brackets for both bridges. (He also drove all the way to Rockport Ontario with his wife Cindy and their son and two girls, and hand-delivered the brackets on Thanksgiving Saturday in time for the brackets to be installed. Thanks Scott )

They are made of heavy steel and have a thick rust resistant coating. The 4 brackets which span the width of the bridge and have sockets at each end, are built into the bridge just above the voussoirs. Stones are fitted around them and then over them, with a final layer of pitched stone over that so that they are held quite secure. Metal or wood posts can be inserted into the square 4 inch sockets connected to the brackets and then handrails attached to the posts.

In the case of the Landon Bay Centre hiking-trail bridge, which is being called Kay's Bridge, the posts and handrails are made from local red cedars. There was some concern while we were building the bridge that the protruding metal sockets would look out of place and/or the wooden posts and handrails would not look correct on a stone bridge. We were pleasantly surprised to see how unobtrusive the metal is and how the handrails and stone work together to create a pleasing rustic look.

Thoroughly Enjoyable

DSWA mastercraftsman Norman Haddow and I co-taught a two day course in Brockport NY together on Saturday and Sunday.The weather was great. We built 32 feet of traditional dry stone wall with eleven enthusiastic students. Norman wasn't sure we would finish it on time but we actually completed the wall, including the proper vertical copes, in enough time to clean up the site and re-stack five pallets of left over stone.

At one point yesterday when things were getting a bit hectic Norman said to me " We need to take some time to gather our thoughts and our throughs."

The two words are closer in spelling than in pronounciation, but we both got the spontaneous pun and laughed.

Here we are with all the students pretending to put on all the thoughs at the same time.

The throughs turned out to be lovely massive stones that stuck well out from the wall on both sides , and which Kathy, the kind lady who runs Sarah's Garden Center, will be able to place plants on and display flowers. The whole weekend was a great success. Everyone in the class said they had a 'thoroughly' enjoyable time.

Testing the Wallers

At our Rocktoberfest event in Rockport, held last weekend, there were seven people who took their certification test. These were all competent wallers who had written to the DSWAC and the DSWA of UK requesting to take this test, to get either their beginner's or their intermediate accreditation.

Each year the DSWAC accommodates for this by organizing a suitable building site somewhere in Canada, including providing the stone material to be used for the testing and arranging for examiners ( all qualified instructors with the DSWA of Uk) to travel to Canada to test individuals who feel they are good enough to build walls according to British standards.

This October we invited Michael Weitzner of the United States and Norman Haddow of Scotland to travel here to do these examinations. Onlookers watched from a distance while these people were being tested, but they were not allowed to talk to them or distract them. The whole process is very interesting to observe. The testing is very thorough and the requirements are very specific.

Accreditation is a good way for individuals who are serious about walling to pursue an officially recognized level of achievement and be evaluated according to strict standards.

Kenny Tauch from Cornerbrook Newfoundland, Mary Hinton and John Montagnes from Cannington Ontario, and Joe Mitchell, Akira Inman and Evan Oxland from Port Hope (six of the seven people who were tested at this year's festival) are seen here after a long day of being testing, which included taking down and rebuilding a sizable section of wall. Although they have each been told whether they passed or not, and Michael and Norman have spent time with each individual going over their section of wall explaining the reason for their marks, the official results can not be posted on the DSWAC website until the paperwork has been received back in Britain and the test results have been accepted by the DSWA of UK examining board.

Gathering in the woods.

Where are all these people going? They don't look like ordinary hikers - and there are so many of them! They all seem very excited about getting somewhere further down this trail. Let's go see.

Here they are, all gathering in the woods. This is like in the middle of nowhere. Are they watching an outdoor sports event or listening to a concert? Perhaps they are watching actors perform in some forest glade.

What can it be that's so interesting? Look at their faces. Such anticipation. They look like they are waiting for something special to happen at any moment . Every eye is on whatever it is that's taking place down in the ravine just below them. The crowd is hushed and focused on some sort of activity off towards the creek.

There it is! They are watching people remove a wooden form, which is all that was supporting a beautiful dry stone stone bridge that the stone-workers just finished building in the forest.

The spectators were wondering if it was going to fall down. Amazingly, it didn't ! No cement. No concrete. No saws. No bobcats or heavy machinery. Just people moving stones and relying only on gravity and friction. Twenty-five tons of rocks and stones, just hanging there in the air. Wow! This is like some giant magic trick with rocks. Most of them have never seen anything like this before, ever !

When they get back down the trail and into their cars and drive home, none of their friends and family are going to believe what they saw today.

Hand-Fitted 'Pitching' Music

Live musical accompaniment is a key element of our walling festivals. The musicians tell us they get inspired watching us work. This video clip starts off with the Ancient Music Duo of Port Hope (Fred Cody and Deborah Henderson) playing at the bridge and then morphs into an explanation on 'pitching'.

Pitching, sometimes called rip rap, is a type of paving technique creating a similar look to a cobble stone surface. It is an ancient road building technique in which medium sized rocks are set on end, or "pitched" up on their side. The stones are hand-fitted tightly together with aggregate packed into the gaps to tighten the construction. Think of a book in a bookshelf, only the spine is showing and the rest of the book is hidden. Modern trail builders all over the world have revived and perfected stone pitching.

Here in this video, taken during the building of Kay's Bridge at the Canadian Thanksgiving festival called 'Rocktoberfest' recently held in Rockport Ontario this year. Gavin Rose, a trail builder with the National Trust, who lives and works in Cumbria England explains a little bit about this paving technique which we used on the bridge.

Little Hands and Softwood

Building a proper dry stone wall involves a lot of the same principles as stacking firewood. The important thing is that the pieces are laid into the wall, not along the wall. At Rocktoberfest last Thanksgiving weekend, our annual children's event involved a fun project teaching the basics of good structural placement, utilizing two full bush cords of softwood we had delivered to the park. The project was to create a temporary 'Andy Goldsworthy-ish' installation out of wood. DSWAC field director Eric Landman and his four boys along with waller Akira Inman and other festival participants built this twirling woodpile to demonstrate what little hands, with some structural guidance and a lot of imagination can achieve

Holding Hands With The Past.

I think the most satisfying aspect of building dry stone walls and and bridges is that even though they are newly completed structures they often give the impression that they are very old.

The bridge in this picture, which was the main dry stone project I headed up for our annual Rocktoberfest event last weekend, was taken yesterday when Gavin, Patrick and Angus and I were there to fit the last stones along the footbridge surface. A dozen or so wallers from Canada and the United States had helped to bring this marvelous bridge into being during the Canadian Thanksgiving walling festival. On Tuesday, the day after the festival, several of us came back and 'pitched' in to finish the stone pathway and then helped to clear up the site.

As we were cleaning up Aaron Wallis a landscaper from the Eastern townships of Quebec and an eager volunteer on this bridge project, came back with his family to take pictures. I took several shots of the new bridge in the dappled afternoon light. I think the sepia filter I applied to the photos of Aaron's wife and children on the bridge adds to this impression of it appearing to be a much older structure than it actually is.

Hands-on dry stone projects like this one provide a visual tie with the past which is as strong as the other historic connections associated with building structures in this traditional method of dry stone construction.

'Index' Finger On The News

http://www.ckwstv.com/index.cfm?page=news&id=3434

Gathering At Table

There have always been a lot of special meals at our Rocktoberfest gatherings. At this years festival Friday's lunch we provided for three dozen walling participants and then an evening 'meet and greet' with pizza spring rolls and chicken wings for 60 people. Then Saturday more great food at lunch and hefty buffet at the Ship's Galley with another 70 people and presentations on the Aran Island walls and dry stone abutments of New England covered bridges. And last night a Thanksgiving turkey buffet was provided for everyone at Caigers in Rockport Ontario, fifty or more wallers and enthusiasts didnt want to stop socializing and the presentations on Balmoral and music by Bobby Watt topped off the evening.

We always try to have the festival be something where people who attend not only come and are involved in some interesting dry stone wall project during the day but also come together to do things in the evenings, so that nobody feels left out.

As I looked at Norman leaning talking to one of the students at the end of day two, I thought how much it was like a gathering around the table to partake of food. Walling is all-fulfilling and totally satisfying, much like everyone gathering around for a good hearty meal.

Many people now have made our annual Rocktoberfest event part of their family's Thanksgiving celebration. The food and friendship is always good whether it be around the dinner table or around a stone wall.

All Hands On Deck

Pre-festival excitement last Thursday as the creek starts to rise where the Landon Bay dry stone bridge is being built this weekend at 1000 islands near Rockport Ontario.

Many Hands Make Light Of Any Differences We Have.

Building stone walls, fireplaces, arches and bridges with many hands is not just lighter and faster work but also very educational. There are representatives here at our Canadian Rocktoberfest from 5 different countries - wallers all bringing their expertise to the four Thanksgiving Festival dry stone projects to create a melting pot of knowledge and ideas.

Here in the picture masons Steve Hodges,Gavin Rose,Michael Weitzner,Patrick McAfee,Charley MacMartin,Menno Braam,Andre Lemieux and I stand around the configuration of voussoirs we have spent the day shaping and fitting on the flat area near the bridge so they can be placed onto the bridge form tomorrow. Patrick's idea of preparing the voussoirs beforehand to one side of the bridge was brilliant. It enabled a lot more accurate pre-fitting and shaping with a lot more of the volunteer wallers participating so that when we move them all over to the bridge and fit them together onto the form tomorrow the actual building of the barrel arch will take very little time at all.

These sharing of ideas and better ways of doing things is what it's all about at these festivals. It's not just the new friendships and getting together in the evening with old friends and wallers from other countries and past events, but also the learning to 'give and take' with each other, and work together as a team, which turns out to be just as important an element of what we are doing . The bridge I envisioned for Landon Bay has become a better structure because of the input of those who have graciously come to add their time and experience to the project, and added valuable input as to how the process of building the bridge can be improved.

Same too with the hiking trail arch and the dry stone fireplace and the way we have organized the two day DSWA training sessions (for the 28 students from all over North America attending tomorrow's workshops ) which will be taught today by Ireland's Patrick McAfee, Scotland's Norman Haddow and the State's Michael Weitzner.

Tomorrow I hope to post pictures of all these projects and spotlight some of the many wallers from all over North America and Britain who have gathered here in Rockport this weekend for what is turning out to be the best dry stone walling festival ever held in Canada.

What does it mean?

A waller's hands often get really dirty during a normal day moving, lifting and hugging stones. These hands were building with an unusually dusty mica stone during a DSWAC dry stone walling workshop I helped run a couple of years ago as a lead in to the Stone Foundation's annual Stone Symposium held in Barre Vermont in 2008.

Evan Oxland's helping hands moved plenty of stone in preparation for that course, and then even more stone during the course of the four days of the workshop when he assisted us in the teaching. His hands and arms seemed to take on an eerie patchy camouflaged look (for some reason more eerie looking than the others who were also working with this grimy stone material). Cropped in this photograph it almost looks like they are the feet of a prehistoric bird or lizard. The dust had collected in blotchy pastel patches mostly where occasional big drops of rain landed on Evan's arms and hands.

They call it dry stone walling but it's other things too. Often it's muddy, dusty, sweaty or wet. While it is not often that walling gets as colourful as Evan seems to have discovered it to be, there are still a lot of hues to what we do. Our clothes get filthy black. Our faces and arms get weathered and brown. Our thumbs and fingers get blue. Our legs and arms get red scratches and our knees get grass-stained green.

There are many different tones in the tons of stones we use too. Pink granites. Yellow buff and brown sandstones. Greeny gneiss and black and blue basalts. Red rusty aggregates and yellow and white speckled quartz.

It seems fitting that such a spectrum of colours should accompany the broad range of experiences and pleasures associated with building beautiful dry stone walls and arches. It's kind of like a 'double rainbow'.

Dry Stone Shape Rings A Buddha Bell

The bell-shaped structure we built in Toronto last weekend reminded some of us of stupa bells ( Buddhist commemorative monuments usually housing sacred relics associated with the Buddha or other saintly persons) like the ones at Borabador, a world heritage site on the Island of Java in Indonesiaat Borabador .

The similarities came about quite by coincidence. However we came upon the reminiscent interesting 'perforated' design for three reasons.

First, since we were building this thing only to be seen the one night of Nuit Blanche we needed it to be lit up effectively, and it seemed a good idea to have it radiating light out of the centre of the hollow bell by creating 'wider spaces' between adjoining stones in each course of stacked stones.

Second we wanted to build as big a structure as we could with the 13 tons of stone we brought to the site (that's a lot of stone to move build and take down in less than 8 hours !) and by spreading the stones, we used up less material, to ensure we would reach our 9 foot high goal for the bell.

Third and most important, by straddling stones that had a fist sized (or even foot sized) gaps between them we increased the stability of the straddling stones above rather than them having a tendency to pivot on stones below, because often their slightly differing heights make them more difficult to bring to level when they are butted up closer to each other. I had to keep telling people to spread the stones further apart and felt like I was teaching a dry stone wall course called Walling minus 101. It definitely felt like 'anti-walling' ( since it was hard to get some of the wallers to build in this different style at first) but it was necessary in the case of us trying to build something this sturdy in the short time we allotted ourselves.

Walling As Art.

Our involvement in Nuit Blanch last Saturday allowed many Torontonians to experience dry stone walling as an art form. Usually stones walls made without mortar are things you merely drive by and at best perhaps say 'look, isn't that nice'. But last Saturday the act of walling somehow moved from being merely a craft, or even a kind of visual art form, to that of being 'performance art'. It may seem strange to think of building with stone as something approaching the realm of dance or theatre, but when you eliminate all the mortar, the dusty work site, the cooky cutter shaped material and all the noisy tools, while at the same time ramping up the creative part by introducing improvisational elements, you get something akin to entertainment. Meanwhile the live music played on 'hand' bells by the Bronze Foundation who accompanied us at this event, very much added to the perception of what we were doing being a performance. Many of us had this sense that the actual process of building of the bell was as important as the finished product.

Bell Nuit!

The Bell nearly completed, (towards 1:30 in the morning) after 6 hours of solid building.

Hundreds of people coming by to watch us all night.

Many many people told us it was the most interesting thing they saw at this year's Nuit Blanche

The morning after

Ringing with our hands.

Tonight is Nuit Blanche, an all-night celebration of the arts in Toronto. As many of you know, in honour of this event we are going to be downtown at Trinity Bellwood Park on Queen Street just east of Ossington Street, putting together a spontaneous '12 tonne composition'. Many wallers, friends of wallers and walling enthusiasts across Ontario will be joining us to create a huge bell-shaped sculpture in the park in the dark. As far as we know, this unique dry stacked stone bell, (having niches and crannies all through it, and brightly lit from the inside) will be the first one of its kind ever built and yet it will exist for barely 7 hours and then we will take it down.

While we build, a full bell orchestra will accompany us in this carzy multi media audio visual architectural/sculptural project.

After many years of almost complete obscurity, it is gratifying to see the craft of dry stone walling starting to become an accepted art form in Canada and adherents to the technique of 'walling without mortar' make such a strong showing in artistic events such as Nuit Blanche.

Why a stone bell?

Perhaps because it visualizes one of the less obvious aspects of stone. It's tone!

Lake District lithophone: the sound of rock music

Coming Up Empty-Handed Sometimes

We were politely notified yesterday in a letter that a proposal we had submitted to the City of Saint John, New Brunswick in its open public art competition, was not selected. We had collaborated with artists out west and in the states on an original idea involving stone carving, lettering and massive semi-dry stone arch construction using a unique fastening system.

Tomas Lipps, director of the Stone Foundation, ever on the look out for this sort of thing, kindly tipped me off about this contest way back in May.

The official blurb read "As part of the celebration of the 225th anniversary of The City of Saint John – Canada’s first incorporated city was pleased to invite professional artists resident in Canada to submit formal proposals to design, develop, create, deliver and install permanent exterior public artwork (“Public Art”) that would be prominently displayed along Saint John’s Harbour. The Public Art would be installed at a location on a triangular-shaped parcel of land along Saint John’s Harbour Passage, bordered by three Harbour Passage pathways and bordered above the parcel by Saint John Harbour Bridge"

The official theme for this work of art was supposed to be ' The Meeting Place'

There was a lot of form filling and as part of the lengthy description of what this tripartite structural/sculptural pieces of artwork was to look like we proposed that it was to be a celebration of the " watery elements of Saint John which were the primary ingredients in its founding. Three half-arches triumphantly spring from the earth, to meet at a central point. This dynamic assemblage of stone, 16.5 feet tall with a 30 foot diameter and weighing 25 tons was to represent the Saint John River, the Kennebecasis, and the Bay of Fundy. These individual half-arches, like the people who live surrounding these waters, are bonded by a mutual dependence. On the base of each half-arch there was to be a bas-relief panel depicting three significant periods in Saint John history:

1 Pre-European contact,

2 European settlement,

3 The Contemporary era.

The structure was to symbolize a three-point meeting place of the waters."

The jury accepted a design and awarded the commission to a local New Brunswick artist.

Ah well, maybe we can 'meet' somewhere else next year. Thanks to all those who were involved and collaborated in this proposal. You know who you are.

Old Reminders of Older Hands

Not far from South Monaghan Ontario along Line 3 Road east of Smithson Road there are the remnants of old dry stone walls either side of the road. The stone is predominantly glacially deposited granite which has been painstaking cleared from the fields many years ago. I was told about these walls last week and wanted to see them for myself, and so, as I was driving back yesterday from a quarry where I picked up 4 tons of rubble limestone to be used (in Toronto) in the Nuit Blanche 'bell sculpture' we will be building this Saturday (an all night 'ringing in' of next Sunday) I took a detour to go see them.

They are in sad disrepair and have obviously had many of their stones removed, probably by people who don't consider these historic features of the Ontario countryside to be of any worth. I think of them however, as valuable architectural landmarks on a historically dissolving landscape. They are as important as any other valuable Canadian antiques. You can't buy them at an auction or purchase them in an antique store to bring home and hang on your wall, but you can appreciate them where they lay, and respect them for the history they hold and the story they tell.

As I look at the old walls I think about the hands that built them. Judging by the moss and lichen on the stones, the last time these stones were moved must have been over a hundred years ago. The placement of each rock was accomplished by hands that are no longer with us. There is only the stoney memorial to them in the clever placement of the silent stones along the wall. The antique furniture tools and dishes we own have value often because we can imagine the people who made them and once used them . So too with old stone walls. As we 'hold' these stoney antiques in view, we join an unspoken line of admiration and respect for the people who held them before and left their timeless mark throughout the country side(roads)