This was my first post to Open Salon, on July 30, 2008.
The picture above shows the general shape of a wall I built a few years ago in our front yard. The wall follows a fairly smooth curve with a dent in the middle, designed to surround two trees near the road running by our house. It's about forty feet long, 27 inches high at its tallest. Although it's a retaining wall, it's so short that I put it up with minimal batter--it doesn't visibly lean inward, toward the soil that's held back. I think it's a reasonably good effort: the wall is sturdy enough to walk on the top course of stones, all the courses (single, layered lines of stone) are flat and horizontal, and there are no cases of excessive run in its structure. (If the joints between the stones continue from one course to the next, that's run. Too much run means structural weakness; stones should be stacked in a two-over-one, one-over-two pattern.)
Building a stone wall is hard work. These stones weigh anywhere from ten to perhaps thirty or so pounds. The ground has to be dug up a bit so that the footing, the bottom course of stones, has a firm foundation; this can mean a fair amount of work if the stones are irregularly shaped. (The least problematic place for big, oddly shaped stones turns out to be the bottom or interior of a wall.) The raised area inside the wall is a couple of dump-trucks-full of soil that I put in, wheelbarrow by wheelbarrow, as the wall went up.
As a novice builder, I was surprised at just how much planning and experimentation are involved in building a wall. After I outlined the wall in the grass, I pounded in vertical wooden stakes along the boundary to hold level lines, horizontal lines of string to guide the placement of each course. It's not possible for every course to be perfectly level, but as long as the surface of each course moves just a little above or below a horizontal line, it looks fine. The hardest, most time-consuming part turns out to be fitting individual stones in place. In a difficult spot, I might try half a dozen different stones, jockeying them into place three or four different ways, until I'm satisfied. (There are levels of expertise in wall building, as in almost every worthwhile activity; I'm still slow and error-prone in my choices.)
The following two pictures show a bit more detail, and it's possible to see where things didn't turn out perfectly, at least visually. The first picture shows a case where I should have used thicker stones on the top course; this was the result of trying to keep the top of the wall level and having built up the lower course a bit too high. (It's always possible to disassemble part of the wall, but given the effort involved in getting those stones to fit in the first place, I try to avoid undoing my work if at all possible.) In the second picture, there are a couple of examples of apparent runs, but these aren't real: the stones overlap reasonably well in the interior of the wall. There's also a large triangular stone on the left that looks as if it's about to fall out, but this is also only apparent: this stone is thicker on the interior, curving downward on the bottom, and it's heavy enough that it should stay in place. These flaws would probably only be noticeable to a experienced wall builder. I think the wall has a pleasing character overall.
Last year I built another wall, just below the first. The wall has the same character as the first wall, which can be seen in the background on the right of the picture below. It follows a circular curve starting at the edge of our driveway and continuing into the yard. Eventually the area above the wall will be planted with bushes and flowers. One detail worth noting about this wall is the corner. It's not perfect, but it is square and blocky, as it should be. Building good corners means finding longer stones with relatively square corners. On each course, the stone at the corner is placed so that its long side runs opposite the corner stone below it. This gives the corner stability, so that the result is more than two stone walls butted against each other at a right angle.
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Chicken Mãâàn
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You'll be happy to know that I am moving ever closer to that announced post. I purchased a new winch and chain to go along with the tripod about six weeks ago in anticipation of doing some rock moving very soon and taking photos of the tripod setup in action. With luck, my photo essay on the tripod will be up before the two year mark of when your stone wall post first appeared!!
John, I remember your saying that you would be doing stone wall work. I'd be really interested in how it turns out. There's an old, restored grist mill about a quarter-mile from my house, and my wife and I sometimes walk the grounds. The mill has dry stone pillars as a foundation, and those stones are enormous--they look to weigh several hundred pounds each. I can image how they're put in place, but it's the same way I imagine the pyramids being built, in the sense that I'm surprised it's at all possible.
my father built dry stone walls along the driveway and in front of my childhood home, I remember the labor, but your essay has given me a new appreciation of the skill and craft that went into it
Thanks for sharing your story, Roy. One of the things I take away from reading about stone wall building is that it's the kind of traditional job (for some very serious people it's even a vocation) that can pass from one generation to the next. Even though there are artists who work in the medium and show their results in museums, it's something I think anyone can do and appreciate.
We are planning to build similar walls in our garden, but we are still developing the yard little by little. I believe that this Summer we will get at least one pathway installed, but we have to take out a mossy brick mess first. I'm sure we'll recycle some of those bricks behind some of the stone as reinforced retaining walls because of our downhill slope and all of the garden soil we've been bringing in.
It is really satisfying to build something that you can see, and touch and which is still there years later. What comes to mind right now are the beautiful library stacks that you made. I particularly admire this combination of intellect and an interest in practical application of craftmanship you embody. It's one of the things I like best about Dan, who keeps doing wonderful things to our home and garden, and many of my friends over the years, primarily artists.
The walls are SO beautiful Rob and I'd love to see what they look like with flowers and ferns in them!
Cap'n, I could measure the weight of those rocks in back ache, I think.
I think of England, too, anna1liese, when I see stone walls.
Thanks for your comments, Susanne. I've seen pictures you've taken of your house and its garden and surroundings; it's clear that we share the same kind of satisfaction in having built something ourselves, something concrete that we can touch (or even sit on. :-) And I like the library, too, still.
::shaking head and smiling::
I did find myself wondering what these walls are for. I guess by that I mean various things. They seem to porous to keep out anything as small as a bug, perhaps even a mouse. Though I might be wrong on that. Even so, there seems little doubt that mouse-size critters are agile enough to get over or around them. So it's presumably not that. They're not tall enough to keep out a fox or a rabbit, I'd guess, which would just jump over. And a bear I suspect would be impeded slightly but could walk through or perhaps be slowed by a second or two if he tried to climb over and managed to kick them around. Then again, maybe they are stronger than they look. But you see my question: They seem mostly decorative. Are they? They're beautiful but so impractical at some level. Or maybe not?
Then again, now as I'm thinking about the matter, something in the back of my mind is flashing on the idea that these stones were originally found in a yard being cleared for other more refined purposes and had to be put somewhere and might have arisen just as a pile to put them somewhere rather than cart them off. That would be a purpose. Do you recall if that's any of it?
Maybe I'm just imagining instability. Oh well. They're very beautiful anyway... I find myself peering out the window and thinking "Maybe we should have some of those around..."
Our walls are mostly decorative, but not entirely. We have a problem with drainage on our front lawn, with rain washing the topsoil off the upper part of the hill toward our house at the bottom of the hill, with the water gaining some speed during heavy rains. So I placed those walls across where it seemed that the water running the hardest. Not that it was a river or stream or anything, but every little bit helps, I think.
Your thoughts reminded me of Gould and Lewontin's discussion of spandrels (I happen to come across the term in biology, though it's an architectural term). You probably know this, but spandrels are curved areas between the arches that support a domed ceiling, most commonly seen in old churches. They don't serve a direct purpose in supporting the ceiling, as far as I know, but artists have used them for decoration. I think there's a similar flavor with some stone walls; they may not be needed for a physical purpose, but if you happen to be in a situation where you have a lot of stones, you might as well put them to some other purpose.