21–30 of 60 posts
The megalithic acropolis and vaulted tombs at Mycenae:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mycenae
The megalithic Nuraghe forts in Sardinia, also with vaulted ceilings:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuraghe
Osaka castle, in Japan (the base wall is made of dry stone):
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Osaka_Castle
The central buildings in Macchu Pitchu (hand-cut dry stone, called ashlar):
My favorite videos are the ones where he walks around a famous stone structure and talks about all the craftsmanship that goes into them.
I 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…
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.
For example, let's say I've had a big party and the kitchen is a mess. Step one might be to put the trash can in the center of the room and dispose of all visible debris. Step two might be to move all remaining small objects to one side of the room to improve visibility, then repeat the trash pass. Step three might then be to wipe down the counters, which are now clear of objects. Etc.
I tend to work in a similarly incremental way on programming tasks. Do you have a more "touch-once" approach there?
In the Bluegrass region of Kentucky [0], there is a rich heritage of stone fences, which are associated with thoroughbred horse farms, but they exist throughout the area because of the abundance of limestone rock available. It is one of the highest concentrations of dry rock structures in the US [1]. There is a similar organization, the Dry Stone Conservancy [2], that runs a similar certification program and workshop…
>There are examples of dry stonewalls and structures that date back 5000 years and are still standing today. Nearly anywhere in the world where stone of suitable sizes was plentiful, walls were built. What I'd like to know is are there any patterns to where the second is true, but said walls haven't lasted thousands of years like the first sentence says? Are there places where ancient stone structures could have been…
I have seen plenty of collapsed dry stone walls. Often the reason for the collapse isn't obvious - I suspect rather than a catastrophic event, it's more that the stones right on the top of the wall aren't held in by interlocking and friction as well as the other stones, so storms and animals can dislodge them. Plants growing in the top of the wall can knock stones off too. If plant matter gets inside the wall, pools…
I'll give you catastrophic. Quite a few years ago me and some mates were camping in a field at night and a lady misjudged a turn and took her car through the dry stone wall. The car threw hefty blocks for an astonishing distance. What was odder was that after the initial smash I could hear heavy thuds as blocks dropped from the sky for what seemed to be up to 10 seconds. Far, far too many seconds to be credible, but that's what I noticed at the time.
Being dark we heard it but didn't see it happen. The full glory was revealed next morning.
If that wall hadn't been in the way the car would have gone all over our tents - and us.
We owe some anonymous derbyshire dry waller a lot of beer for putting it in the way.
(The lady was uninjured if extremely shocked)
In the Bluegrass region of Kentucky [0], there is a rich heritage of stone fences, which are associated with thoroughbred horse farms, but they exist throughout the area because of the abundance of limestone rock available. It is one of the highest concentrations of dry rock structures in the US [1]. There is a similar organization, the Dry Stone Conservancy [2], that runs a similar certification program and workshop…
Eh, the fences are nice and I love Lexington, but I would credit the fences mostly to the legacy of slavery. Lots of places have limestone. Those fences didn't build themselves. It's great that people nowadays are conserving them, but I haven't seen many new fences down there.
That's not to say that slavery does not play a role in the history of the area (and the entire country), but much of the heritage of the stone fences has little to do with slavery or slave labor. Post emancipation, the number of freedmen stonemasons slowly grew and displaced Irish stonemasons.
[0] - https://books.google.com/books?id=UDHQjDJ677MC&pg=PA84&sourc...
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Eh, the fences are nice and I love Lexington, but I would credit the fences mostly to the legacy of slavery. Lots of places have limestone. Those fences didn't build themselves. It's great that people nowadays are conserving them, but I haven't seen many new fences down there.
This is actually a huge misconception and false. The majority of fences were built by immigrant Irish stonemasons, although it is obvious that slave labor probably played some role in this. The style of stone fence was directly imported from Ulster & Northern Ireland, with Irish immigrants. If you'd like to know more about the history of the fences, and more specifically, the masons that built them, the authoritative…
Still, southern Missouri has lots of limestone (it's "the cave state"), and had lots of Irish and Scottish immigrants, and I can think of precisely one "slave fence" in the whole state. If the difference wasn't limestone, and it wasn't Irishmen, maybe it was that Kentucky had lots of rich tobacco plantation owners, and Missouri didn't.
Earlier 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.
I'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+…