Highland Games of Durham 2004 Pictures
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The dry stone wall association of Canada had a fabulous two days at the Highland Games in Uxbridge this year. Members of the DSWAC from Montreal, Whitby, Kitchener, Orangeville, along with John Shaw-Rimmington (president of the DSWAC) built a dry stone wall sheepfold out of Rip Rap stone supplied by Lafarge.

The pile of stone looked a bit intimidating when it was first dumped at the park, but we all rallied together and wrestled it into this lovely turf top dry stone wall structure complete with small arched entrance way.

It actually held sheep for people to view and it was used to demonstrate authentic old style sheep shearing techniques. Lots of people were blown away with what you can do with random stone if you know how to build without mortar and you are willing to think outside the (gabion) cage.

Everyone did such a great job, but special extra thanks to Dean McClellan for helping us with a great foundation, Mike Patten for all his help moving and stacking stone, Scott Ryan and Chris Overing who split and shaped some great looking rocks , and Steve Fraser who helped with the arch form and added the turf top. Chris filmed the whole thing with a time-laps video camera, so we should have an interesting movie available soon. He also took shots of the sheepfold from 25 feet above, suspending the camera with mason's string line hung from branches, so those shots should be pretty interesting to see.