The Handy String-Line

We always use string-lines when we are building a straight wall. Always. We tell our students to use them and teach them how to use them. To think that people can build straight without them is pretty crazy. We occasionally, to get round something or access a tricky spot may remove a section temporarily or we may untie them to move a lot of stone across to the other side of the wall, but essentially these lines have to be there while we are building and they are in fact essential in the process of building a good straight wall.

And you can't just put them up and ignore them. A student has to know what he's looking for. He has to be able to line up his stones according to the level and plane that these string-lines are tracing. You have to check and keep checking them. And they can't be set up wrong or attached to loose batter frames or aligned incorrectly.

We have two ways of putting up lines. They can both be very useful. The first requires putting up one line either side of the wall, up to each level you are working to. When this level is completed the lines are raised to the next level. This is very good for doing walls with all the same heights of coursing. It makes it very easy. It helps too if you are creating, or in some cases recreating (repairing) a random coursed wall. However it does make it difficult to have several students working on the wall at the same time. There is inevitably always someone inadvertently leaning into or pulling back the guide lines while someone else is trying to sight down them.

Sometimes the solution to this problem, especially if you are building in a more random coursed style or working with more irregular shaped material, is the second method of setting up string lines – a method that I learned from Patrick McAfee a terrific walling instructor, heritage masonry author and stone and lime mortar expert from Ireland.

You set up two pairs of lines well above the height everyone is working. This way you can sight down onto the two lines, line them up and maintain the plane and batter of the wall with each stone you place with its face aligned along the same plane defined by these lines. All the while people can still be leaning over the wall or moving stones and not disturbing your sighting. Closing one eye and taking care to fit each stone properly you can keep all the stones faces flush with the wall along three dimensions.

It is still important to step back occasionally to ensure that the stones are all running level and horizontally along each section of random coursing and that you are still covering your joints all the time.

Hand-written thank you to a stone.

Sometimes all it takes is a friend

There are times when everything looks dire and I cannot imagine that a better day is coming.

We all have those days I guess.

Luckily they get spread around sufficiently so that when I am down someone close to me is always up and willing to reach out a hand to help. If there is one good thing about the bad times it is this magical formula.

I have had a week of bad days, a mountain of reasons to doubt that decency and common sense will ultimately prevail over the sun-storm flare-ups of negativity and criticism.

Life is tough enough without people being so eager to believe the worst that they rush headlong in the wrong direction, then turn and defend it, instead of saying, "Perhaps I have been a bit hasty..."

Or, like Fagan in Oliver Twist, "I-think-I'd-better-think-it-out-again!"

I have found during this long week when my own resources of optimism were waning, friends stepped up to encourage, cheer and advise, but mostly just to be close by.

Sometimes, all it takes is a friend.

My thanks to John, Sean, Andrew, Scott, Norman, Eric and Dan who I am fortunate to count as friends.

My grand-daughter, FC (on the right with her friend, Kate) has already worked this principle out. Just look at those helping hands.

good company

What stones can tell you when they rock.

If a stone wiggles in the wall you are building it is trying to tell you something. Stones have so few ways of communicating to us. It's not their fault.

I suspect if we were more developed we would have a much better sense of what was going on in their mysterious mineral world. While we may notice if a stone rocks or not, there is very little else we will are able to learn about their deeper workings. We are basically ignorant of any higher purpose or significance, except in the dull realization that they look good, and seem to like being made into various well-proportioned finely-crafted stone buildings and yes, placed in well-stacked dry laid structures too.

A proper dry stone wall has various sized stones in it that are not cemented together. This does not mean they are at all supposed to be loose, jiggling around or easily moved just by leaning on them or putting other stones near to them. They should in fact be 'locked in' together. A 'rock' that is properly laid in a wall, is not supposed to.

The position and look of the 'hearting' in the middle of your wall should give the impression that all the stones have been there for hundreds of years - as if all the stones have naturally bedded along a flat stoney pathway over time. They should look like they have found their most settled state. If a wall's innards look peaceful and none of the stones move, the stones are telling you they're happy and that the wall is going to last.

First Hand Therapy.

Andrew Geekie took a DSWAC course I taught back in 2005 in Port Hope, Ontario and from that start went on to build a lovely garden wall on his own country property.

He and his wife moved into town a few years later, had a house built and began constructing another beautiful wall along the north side his front yard. Last year he emailed me to say he was off to England because he was enjoying it so much and wanted learn more. Here is a report he sent me this week about that trip.

Andy Geekie (in the Yellow jacket)

at weekend training event last year in Yorkshire.

A WEEKEND WITH THE YORKSHIRE DRY STONE WALLING GUILD

Well with a beginners course under my belt and a couple of walls to my credit I was really enjoying my new hobby. I had read a great deal on the subject of walling, but was still not entirely confident that my technique was acceptable, or on a par with the standards of the local walling fraternity here in Port Hope. I was also aware that my construction times were way to slow to contemplate being tested on my proficiency. So where do I go to obtain that confidence I need for a better sense of satisfaction on completion of my next project? Home of course!

Well, strictly speaking, two and a half hours drive north of where I grew up but North Yorkshire is certainly home to miles of dry stone walls.

I discovered via the internet that the Yorkshire Dry Stone Walling Guild held weekly courses for beginners over the spring and summer months and as a trip to England was in the planning stages, I decided to enroll in a course. Luckily, the course turned out not to be a typical wall repair in the middle of nowhere but a permanent build within the confines of ‘ Fountains Abbey ‘ in Ripon, North Yorkshire. The wall was to be built utilizing students, over four courses during May and June. The finished wall was six foot tall and enclosed an area of six hundred square feet with a turnstile incorporated into its construction.

Apparently, the Abbey gift shop had the need for an outdoor facility to sell herbs and potted plants. The current practice was to have them on display at the gift shop exit where naturally the general public considered anything on the tables as ‘ going away gifts.’ The turnstile and walled enclosure would now shepherd the visitors past the gift shop cash registers with their plants in hand.

All settled into my bed and breakfast and with a good night’s sleep behind me I headed off to Fountains Abbey to begin the first day of the course. On arrival, I was immediately introduced to the two instructors Cliff Bailey and Steve Gray along with eight other students. After a brief orientation we went straight to work with the students being evenly split on both sides of the wall. Hands-on is a great way to learn and although the majority of us were new to walling it wasn’t too long before we were using the local terminology and watching a wall grow “ right before our very eyes “ as Arthur Askey used to say.

Small holdings, hobby farms or even country houses with acreage are becoming increasingly popular in the British Isles as the people head for the country and away from city living. However, many of these properties have dry stone walls in various states of disrepair and the desire to return them to their original splendor has sparked an interest in walling.

Consequently, we were taught how to strip out a damaged wall, identifying the various stones - cope, cover, through and building stones – along with foundation preparation. There seems to be no need to excavate any further, other than removing the turf layer in North Yorkshire. This may be different in other areas of the UK but I gotthe impression that creating a drainage ditch as we do in Canada is not necessary.

If I were to criticize the course format in any way, I would be hesitant to fault either of the instructors, for to my mind, the project itself made it difficult for eight or so students to all contribute at the same time. Choosing the best stone for the correct fit, is time consuming, and upon finding that stone and returning to the work area, only to find another student has already supplied a stone for that very same spot in the wall, made for a frustrating few moments. However, they were far and few between and a small inconvenience for the privilege of taking part in the construction of a wall which will still be standing long after I’m gone.

The overall experience made for a very gratifying weekend which I would certainly recommend to anyone interested in learning more about the art of dry stone walling …..

A THERAPY SECOND TO NONE!

Andrew Geekie

A handsome bridge, shining in the winter sun.

'Bridges'

by Bill Staines

There are bridges, bridges in the sky. They are shining in the sun.

They are stone and steel and wood and wire. They can change two things to one.

They are languages and letters. They are poetry and all.

They are love and understanding and they're better than a wall.

There are canyons. There are canyons. They are yawning in the night.

They are rank and bitter anger. They are all devoid of light.

They are fear and blind suspicion. They are apathy and pride.

They are dark and so foreboding and they're oh, so very wide.

Let us build a bridge of music. Let us cross it with a song.

Let us span another canyon. Let us right another wrong.

And if someone should ask us where we're off and bound today,

We will tell them building bridges and be off and on our way.

The picture of the 'Bridge In Winter' is Kay's Bridge, a completely dry stone bridge built in 2010 at Landon Bay Centre in Ontario Canada during the Canadian dry stone wall festival - Rocktoberfest. The picture was taken last January.

A big thanks again to the many walling friends from the States, Britain Ireland and all over Canada who journeyed to the 1000 Islands biosphere park to participate in this event (as well as three other dry stone projects) last October, and who came to share their knowledge and build bridges.

Opposing Thumbs

Our hands are very useful things. The fingers of our hands work together well. They, like people are meant to cooperate. The thumbs are said to be 'opposed' . It means they are opposed to the direction of our fingers. This is not so that they can accuse them of every infraction they can come up with (or perhaps, invent) out of vengeance and/or blind allegiance to the 'cause of thumbs', but rather to help the body grasp things and promote the useful cause of our species.

I do wish I didn't have to keep addressing this same old issue.

Opposing thumbs enable a waller who is doing his job to apply pressure to either side of a rock to create enough friction to suspend the rock in the air without it slipping, and so effectively pick up a rock and put it in a wall. The pressure and friction is not supposed to vaporize the rock. A waller who is more interested in building a war than a wall will be tempted to see aggression and 'opposition' as his duty, out of pride or fear of losing his or her status amongst their fellow dry stone warriors. This obviously can do a lot of damage. It is also stupid and unproductive.

Interestingly the idea of opposing thumbs can be falsely defined as the giving both the 'thumbs up' and the 'thumbs down' at the same time. This of course describes the sending of a mixed message. I give two thumbs up to people who are honestly trying to 'grasp' dry stone walling here in Canada, as well as those of any walling organization who offer the hand of friendship, communication, good faith and who do not 'oppose' wallers unfairly behind their backs. My blog is open. The organizations I belong to can be joined by anyone.

My thumbs are opposed to the constant finger pointing . I look forward toward to a time when hands are joined in celebration of the peaceful art of walling. Actually, that's what the annual International Dry Stone Wall Festival – 'Rocktoberfest' in Canada, is all about.

And like this blog, it's FREE.

Magnified Disappointment

Magnified 20 million times, stones and many other materials still have an orderly crystalline composition.

Any concrete ideas as to what lies hidden deep inside concrete?

Zoom in to find out.

Double-click on the screen for the larger format of this video.

Nothin' bout stones either, except in the background.

Went to hear Kevin Breit yesterday. This was an inexpensive night out at Lula Lounge at an enjoyably small venue in Toronto, but as far as packing a punch it might as well been a full-scale big name concert at the Rogers Centre. It was fantastic.

Kevin is a versatile, imaginative, highly skilled musician who has gone the distance. He plays amazing guitar, writes beautiful words and music, and his voice is just unique enough to match his other talents. I have known him mostly as a wildly experimental jazz guitarist, but the melodic vocal direction he has pursued in recent years has revealed a whole new musical facet.

Why this video is here is to remind me of how wide the creative opportunities are to do things beyond the normal or the expected. ( not that this particular video is so unusual, but I did like the old stone barn foundation)

Kevin opens the door to new ideas rather than relying on the same old predictable money-making musical formulas. I feel personally challenged to expand the parameters of this blog so as not to be trying just to fit it into someone else's notion of where it should be going.

The lyrics suggest a strange disconnect. My own stone-sided take on it is this.

Sometimes you can talk about lots of related things and yet never make reference to the fact that they are, or ever were connected. The crumbling stone foundations of rural Ontario are a fading reminder of how disconnected and diminished we have become. Most of us have little understanding of how integrally related proper land stewardship used to be. The food industry as it becomes more and more specialized and supposedly more 'efficient' has made us all too dependent and wasteful. Perfectly good stone material from fallen down barns and hedge rows continues to be bulldozed into the ground throughout this province as even ecologically minded people miss the connection that exists between local food, local initiatives and local natural building resources.

Grasping Beyond Our Reach

Pierre-Auguste Renoir had a handle on how 'creatively' sometimes we have to allow ourselves to be stretched. He wrote..."One must from time to time attempt things that are beyond one's capacity."

Robert Browning penned something similar . “Ah, but a man's reach should exceed his grasp, or what's a heaven for?

REACH

There are always set backs along the way too. The route from conceptualization to realization isn't always straight or swift . You may have an idea without any foreseeable opportunity presenting itself as to where or when the thing might ever be executed. Waiting plays a big part in this process. Exceeding ones grasp may in fact involve an exceeding amount of waiting. But this may merely be a 'stay of execution'. And then the thing may have to die before it finds wings.

Case in point was this design which had been shelved for years until finally the right opportunity came along to implement it. It needed a client who trusted that it was going to work and look good. Then the challenge became to imagine how to actually do it!

The good thing is that much of the process often involves extra hands and friendly cooperation.

And finally, if what you create together is a success, a bottle of something can be be cracked open and a bit of a christening is in order, while everyone holds a celebratory drink in their hands.

Wondering if there's a dry stone 'handle' for this story?.

As I was going through the exit stile at the Berkley BART subway station a couple of weeks ago, the gate closed prematurely behind me on the heavy suitcase I was towing. I had borrowed it for my trip from my daughter Maddy. She had bought it in Spain with her own money, loved it and asked me to take care of it.

After you insert your ticket in it, the nasty rubber scissor-armed stile opens and closes briefly allowing one lucky passenger through at a time. As I scurried through, my suitcase got mechanically wedged behind me. I pulled hard, but the anti-'jaws of life' would not let go and the next thing I knew the extend-a-handle thingy on my suitcase bent out of shape. By the time I managed to rescued it from BART's clutches and drag it outside the whole handle apparatus came off in my hands.

There I was, pretty much stranded with this heavy 'handle-less' suitcase, now deciding to walk the shortest distance in any direction to find any hotel in the vicinity. Did I say it was really hot? Usually this is an attractive aspect of California in winter for a vacationing Canadian – but not today.

It's surprisingly difficult to pull a heavy suitcase with no handle along on tiny wheels through a crowded city ( it didn't even have a finger-hole to grip onto) I looked ridiculous. I stumbled along , rested every few steps before I dragged it along again. I'm guessing I looked more homeless than any bag-laden-shopping-cart street person.

I got to a nearby Travel Lodge, checked into a room and collapsed. I knew I owed Maddy a brand new suitcase; a better one than this trouble maker. Maybe the BART owes her the suitcase, I don't know, but I think this involves a lot of hassle to find out.

I was not looking forward to trying to lug this now handle-less piece of baggage around any more, especially to the airport on my return. Since there was absolutely no griphold on the end of the suitcase, I decided to drill a hole though the heavy plastic casing and jury-rig a coat hanger wire thing in order to attach my belt so that I could drag it behind me on its wheels again. Though the repair looked pretty nasty and makeshift it worked well enough until early Monday morning when the airport shuttle guy grabbed to lift it into the back of the bus and snapped the belt and sent the buckle whizzing into the air.

The driver looked very apologetic. He quickly recovered the buckle from under the bus and handed it to me. I said " Thanks, but I don't think I'll need that anymore".

I felt bad for him and gave him a big tip.

Relics from the present.

Strawhenge

Some years ago we built a scaled-down, rather whimsical version of Stonehenge out of large (industrial size?) bales of straw. It came from an idea I had when it occurred to me how monumentally suggestive the landscape had become as more and more fields in Canada were dotted with these modern agrarian megaliths. It was exciting to do and very rewarding to involve others in the community of Port Hope, a town we had recently moved to.

The thing was curiously immortalized on a website in August of 2004. I had originally planned to add more photos and updates and perhaps include news of other fanciful landscape installations. I got busier and busier with the Dry Stone Wall Association in Canada and the Strawhenge website unfortunately got completely neglected.

Now I can't even remember how to get back into the site to change it (even to cut the grass, which must be terribly overgrown by now). I have had many correspondences with the webmaster and even he doesn't have the password or know how to reconfigure the administration page to enable me to update it or dismantle it. And so it remains in cyberspace, a peculiar site – a virtual relic on the information highway – which people may hear about and come to visit or just happen see through the screen as they pass by (not unlike the real Stonehenge I suppose)

Anyway, there are many other fascinating websites devoted to unusual 'henges', most of them better maintained than mine. Here is one that I really like

Clonehenge

How do you like your Rocks?

Hard ?

Stoney side up ?

Easy over ?

Scrambled ?

Poached ?

Friable?

Caged-in style ?

or with an English Muffin?

Stone Evolution - A Stoney Volition?

I find more and more these winter days I am caught ('captivated'?) between the concept of 'a rock wall and a hard drive'. Reading a bit more about my mac computer, and the interconnection it has with a certain stone material has made me want to get my hands on even more information.

I have discovered that a 'mineral', (the stuff that makes up rock) which is a homogeneous, naturally occurring, inorganic solid crystalline substance with a specific chemical composition, may not be as 'inorganic' as first presumed. A quartz crystal, for instance in a grain of sand, is a mineral, and is crystalline because it has atoms in a regular microscopic arrangement. While life is organized in DNA molecules, various minerals grow by following a crystallized molecular organization.

Silica (SiO2) otherwise known as silicon dioxide, a very special, hard, glassy mineral found in such materials as rock, sand and opal is surprisingly not that uncommon, but in a refined form it is used worldwide in the manufacture of transistors, solar cells, rectifiers, silicones and in micro chips. It is not a stretch to say that this particular mineral transmuted itself into a 'livelier' form of existence associated with the complex digital activity of high-tech computers.

Now there is evidence that certain minerals have 'developed' in other ways too.

New research shows that minerals on Earth have evolved alongside living organisms – and the diversity of minerals on our planet can also be linked to the processes of life. Evolution isn't just for living organisms.

Scientists at the Carnegie Institution say that the mineral kingdom co-evolved with life, and that up to two thirds of the more than 4,000 known types of minerals on Earth can be directly or indirectly linked to biological activity. Robert Hazen and his colleagues found "both the variety and relative abundances of minerals have changed dramatically over the more than 4.5 billion years of the Earth's history." Unique to Earth, volcanic activity, interaction with water and plate tectonics helped create new kinds of physical and chemical environments where new minerals formed over many years, thereby boosting mineral diversity to more than a thousand types.( other less evolved planets in our solar system have far fewer mineral species)

I envision a scenario where a very long time ago, strange primitive rock types began crawling their way out of the same 'primeval soup' that living proteins did, oozing up from the very same amino acids where the earliest forms of life are suspected to have appeared. Was this of their own free will? I suspect so, but unlike us, I think the stones may have some sort of plan.

I hate 'Running Joints'

Just to clear things up a bit I should tell you I bought this pretty funny book called I Hate Everything for a birthday present for my son Robin two days ago. I ended up reading most of it ( I hate that I did that) before I gave it to him at a birthday brunch yesterday. Needless to say, I found lots of food for thought (and blogging). I have not heard yet if Robin likes his present. He, of course, may have hated it.

The thing about the book is the clever way it progresses and folds in on itself. The things the author hates sometimes end up turning in on themselves and morphing into the things he knows he condones. That the things he hates are often due to his incriminating low standards, self-loathing and feelings of sour grapes makes it humourous and surprisingly revealing.

You might want to check it out.

http://www.thehatepage.com/TheHatePage/The_Book.html

There is also a facebook page devoted to I Hate Everything, where people can add all their own funny, often compromised, submissions.

http://www.facebook.com/pages/I-HATE-EVERYTHING/365336034731

In keeping with the theme of 'thinking with my hands' and building dry stone walls I'm listing a couple things I hate here. I'll probably list a few more in the coming days.

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I hate 'running joints'.

They're sometimes called 'zipper joints' or 'vertical joints'

( Up and down cracks in the wall where stones are not bonded well - that is, the stones are not laid one-over-two or two-over-one)

I hate that I see quite a few in the walls I've built.

I hate that they show up so conspicuously afterwards in a photo, or worse, in someone else's photo. I really hate that running joints show up most clearly after those pictures have been posted on the internet.

I hate that people make such a big deal about running joints.