Stone Walling- article in LINK magazine
[ Back to Latest News and Submissions ] [ Return to Home Page ]
I spent a couple of days recently working on the same job site as
John
Shaw-Rimmington. John is a waller practicing the ancient craft of
building dry stone walls. Most of the stone work that we encounter in
this part of the world is held together with mortar whereas his
structures are held together by nothing more than careful placement
and gravity. This mortarless method is prevalent in many parts of the
British Isles, where John was born.
The work I was doing (painting the interior of the cottage) resulted
in something aesthetically pleasing that will last for several years.
The wall that John built was beautiful in a deep elemental way, and
it
should have a lifespan of more than a hundred years. Hadrian’s Wall
which still stands in parts of Britain was built of dry stone around
120 AD.
The basic principles of stone building are simple enough. First, have
plenty of stone on hand to choose from, then build a wall wider at
the
bottom than the top. Each stone is angled back slightly from those
below it, creating a taper or batter toward the top ( about one inch
per foot of height). Follow the pattern of placing one stone over two
and two stones over one. John looks for the plane or face of each
stone and orients it to the outside. Beyond the fundamentals, stone
walling is a creative matter of linking the visual with the physical.
As John likes to say, "It is sort of like thinking with your hands."
After the work was done in the evening, we sat down to play a game of
Scrabble. I quickly learned that John loves words as much as he loves
stones. John opened the game with T-E-D-I-O-U-S and began to share
his
zeal for walling with me. "I think that it is true, that stone is the
building material of the future," he said glancing up for a moment.
"Did you know that the words stone and notes use the same letters?"
After a series of unfulfilling jobs, John (like many of us) came to
his passion later in life. He found employment with a skilled mason,
building mortared stone foundations for log houses. In his spare
time,
John was raising Highland Cattle on his farm near Uxbridge. When he
started imagining his cattle fenced with stone walls just like in
their native Scotland, imagination turned into dry stone fences and
in
the process John learned this aspect of the masonry craft.
"It’s all about visual conception," he explained "you are constantly
referencing your stone pile, restraining yourself from using a stone
that will be more useful later on." Sounds like Scrabble , I thought
to myself. Then having found a strategic opening, John placed V-E-X
on
the Scrabble board for a score of 48 points. "If you work with the
concept that every stone has a place, it frees you to discover each
stones use."
"John founded the Dry Stone Wall Association of Canada to promote the
art of dry stone building in this country. (www.dswac.ca) and
regularly teaches one day seminars for beginners. He currently
organized Canada’s first Dry Stone Wall Festival in Port Hope on
Thanksgiving Weekend. He lined up two Master Craftsmen from Scotland
and a Jazz band for the event. The centrepiece was the
construction of a permanent dry stone footbridge spanning a small
creek. Check the website out for details.
David Sheffield is a freelance writer photographer and mediocre
Scrabble player. He lives with his family in Baltimore Ontario. Feel
free to contact him at dsheff@wildmail.com.
-- This is an article in the October issue Number 120
of
a Southern Ontario Magazine called The Link
Submitted by David Sheffield