Damn you, HN. I have enough hobbies already, plus I am old. Now I want to build a dry stone wall somewhere.
Dry Stone Walls – Principles of structurally sound construction (2018)
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Re: Dry Stone Walls – Principles of structurally sound construction (2018)
#52Damn you, HN. I have enough hobbies already, plus I am old. Now I want to build a dry stone wall somewhere.
Not sure old counts, Churchill had brick laying as hobby into his sixties. He wrote to Stanley Baldwin in 1927: "I have had a delightful month—building a cottage and dictating a book. 200 bricks and 2,000 words per day." He started with garden walls.
Have fun with your new hobby. :)
https://www.reddit.com/r/HistoryPorn/comments/708sxb/winston...
Re: Dry Stone Walls – Principles of structurally sound construction (2018)
#53I picked up a wonderful concept from a teenage summer spent dry stone walling in the Cotswolds. When you pick up a stone from the pile, it MUST be placed on the wall. You either have to make it fit your intended spot through rotation or another adjustment, or you have to find another place on the wall for it. It CANNOT be placed back on the pile. I'm sure these rules are not adhered to that widely but they had some g…
Have also built stone walls in the Cotswolds, and I wouldn’t agree with you about not putting a stone you picked up back. Sometimes when you pick up from the pile you didn’t see part of the stone that makes it entirely unsuitable. It’s better to pick the best stone to complement the space than try and jam something in that sorts of fits. Have done it in the winter in a blizzard on the side of a hill - that was a pain…
Good to see you here, am well thank you and I hope likewise!
To your point, that's just the tradition I was told by the stonemason who built the walls I helped on.
There's a subtle art to pre-examining the stones before picking, it wasn't a case of if you touched it, it had to be picked up. It was more if you committed to this stone then make it work in this spot or another. There's always a place :-)
Re: Dry Stone Walls – Principles of structurally sound construction (2018)
#54Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is an excellent rule for cleaning up (a room, a house, an office...): touch any given thing once at most. In extreme cases, it doesn't work because you don't actually know where things are going to go, in which case a two-round approach is good: everything gets pulled out and sorted in round one, and things go to their destinations in round two.
That's how I clean - pull everything out, assess, and put it all away. It's very efficient if you have enough space, but it drives people nuts because they see it as causing more of a mess.
Heap sort vs insertion sort.
Re: Dry Stone Walls – Principles of structurally sound construction (2018)
#55I'm from Mallorca, a little Mediterranean island near Barcelona, and we have a great dry stone walls tradition there. The people that do it are called margers in the local language. They never really disappeared, and they finally formed a guild a couple of years ago. Here are some pictures if anyone is interested: https://www.google.com/search?newwindow=1&biw=1745&bih=906&t... https://www.google.com/search?q=margers+…
Thank you, that was fascinating. It appears in the pictures that the stones are roughly uniform size. Is that natural or are they worked in someway before they are placed in the walls?
I have no idea. I imagine there is some degree of sorting and modification of the stones.
Re: Dry Stone Walls – Principles of structurally sound construction (2018)
#56A friend of mine did a practical course on building dry stone walls recently. She was taught various building styles from different parts of the UK. There's more than one way to pile a rock!
Re: Dry Stone Walls – Principles of structurally sound construction (2018)
#57Damn you, HN. I have enough hobbies already, plus I am old. Now I want to build a dry stone wall somewhere.
Not sure old counts, Churchill had brick laying as hobby into his sixties. He wrote to Stanley Baldwin in 1927: "I have had a delightful month—building a cottage and dictating a book. 200 bricks and 2,000 words per day." He started with garden walls. Have fun with your new hobby. :) https://www.reddit.com/r/HistoryPorn/comments/708sxb/winston...
What a lovely answer. Thank you. I am in fact working on a book and a compiler at the moment!
Re: Dry Stone Walls – Principles of structurally sound construction (2018)
#58Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don't know about thousands of years off hand, but if you spend some time in New England you will see the truth to the poet's words: Something there is that doesn't love a wall, That sends the frozen-ground-swell under it, And spills the upper boulders in the sun; And makes gaps even two can pass abreast. Many, most, all of the dry stone walls once in pasture and now in forest used to be straight, neatly stacked wal…
I have a friend there and they say it's pretty common to hire someone to restack them
The title of the poem is, in fact, "Mending Wall", and the overall subject is the yearly work to maintain the stone walls and musing on the necessity of the work.
Re: Dry Stone Walls – Principles of structurally sound construction (2018)
#59I picked up a wonderful concept from a teenage summer spent dry stone walling in the Cotswolds. When you pick up a stone from the pile, it MUST be placed on the wall. You either have to make it fit your intended spot through rotation or another adjustment, or you have to find another place on the wall for it. It CANNOT be placed back on the pile. I'm sure these rules are not adhered to that widely but they had some g…
I use the same idea when stacking firewood.
Re: Dry Stone Walls – Principles of structurally sound construction (2018)
#60I picked up a wonderful concept from a teenage summer spent dry stone walling in the Cotswolds. When you pick up a stone from the pile, it MUST be placed on the wall. You either have to make it fit your intended spot through rotation or another adjustment, or you have to find another place on the wall for it. It CANNOT be placed back on the pile. I'm sure these rules are not adhered to that widely but they had some g…
I'm not, or can't be, that disciplined. In a more general sense though, when I lay old brick up for walkways and patios, I have come to appreciate this odd zen-like state I fall into. I always have 5 or 10 deformed candidates on standby when there is a hole or a slot that a 'perfect' rectangular brick won't fit into. Imperfections are solved most easily by objects with other imperfections.