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GTB · Bushton Bushwacker Joined: 05 Jun 2007 Posts: 2206 Status:

Here is some pictures of a wall which we built in 2002 in the village where I live. The wall is a very large "U" shape which forms the boundary of the rear garden of the house in the picture. It is approx. 120m in length, 2m high and 500mm thick. It was built using 106 tons of natural lime stone which was quarried at Farmington, Glos. All the stone was cut and dressed by hand (using a 100 year old stone axe that I had been given by an old mason some years previously) and no cement has been used in the actual construction of the wall except to form the "cock and hen" style capping. The core of the wall is filled using rubble stone and lime mortar. Every now and again when dry stone walling you have to build in a tie stone to hold everything together which has a face on both sides and is obviously quite large because the wall is 1/2m thick! On two sides of the wall we had an existing wall to build off. Unfortunately we could not match the existing stone which was a very hard iron stone which is no longer quarried. Because of it's size I built the outside skin whilst a colleague built the internal skin (garden side). We had to work in tandem so that we could build in the tie stones as we went. The wall took us just over six months to build.

This is the only section where we could build the wall totally from scratch.

How about this for a lovely flat wall then!! :wink: Building this section of the wall took us just over two months between the two of us. I made the date stone from an old quoin stone I found dumped. It had to be cut to form a curve so that it would follow the line of the wall and then have the letters M M I I carved into it (2002). An old lady first assumed that this was the name of the house and pronounced it as "Mee". :roll: It has weathered very quickly since it was built in.

Here is a small section of the stone work that went into building this large wall. As you can see all the stone has to be trimmed to form a nice flat(ish) face (you can see some evidence of tool marks on some of the stone) and the tops and bottoms of the stone have to be trimmed to form a flat surface so that the next stone will sit nicely on top. Some of the long stones are ties but even the narrow stones will be approx. 300mm long into the wall. The wall has been left to weather naturally despite some people saying that it should be sprayed with Cow manure or cold tea.

That wall could be labelled as a 1 million piece jigsaw puzzle with no picture to go to except the imagination of the men who built it.

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Chris P Bacon · Posted: Mon May 25, 2009 11:18 am Post subject:

gtb
Most impressed, Are you sure you dont do this for a living.
When i was a boychap I did some labouring for a dry stone waller,He had to fill in a gap where a gate and a small section of post and rail was removed.
I think about 30 tons of stone was delivered and he gave me the job of sorting the stone into different sizes, 16 years old and a pile of stone to sort I thought my head was going to explode, still i watched him do his magic and the result was great.

GTB · Bushton Bushwacker Joined: 05 Jun 2007 Posts: 2206 Status:

I am a bricklayer by trade (I could post some photos of some fancy brickwork we have done but it would be a very tenuous link to post it here in the garden section

) but I have also done a lot of stonework over the last 20 years or so. The thing I enjoy the most about building walls (or even houses) of this magnitude is that they will be here a very long time after I am gone and will be some sort of epitaph to my individual skill.
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pimpdriver · Posted: Tue Jun 02, 2009 9:58 pm Post subject:

It is a very impressive wall, but it must have cost the owners a fortune!!

And isn't it a bit out of place for a new house?

But a masterpiece.

GTB · Bushton Bushwacker Joined: 05 Jun 2007 Posts: 2206 Status:

The house was about 8 years old when we built the wall, and yes it was expensive - it ran into 5 figures.

The client wanted something that was going to stand the test of time, be low on maintenance and be a feature not only to his garden but also his house. I think he got what he asked for.

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Local lass · Calnetalk Oracle Joined: 05 Jun 2007 Posts: 4792 Status:

verynice

Chepfer · Posted: Wed Jun 03, 2009 1:14 pm Post subject:

Nice Job G, very impressive.

Do you ever get the urge to leave a signiture stone in there somewhere, you know, one with your initial engraved on it .... i would if it were me.

GTB · Bushton Bushwacker Joined: 05 Jun 2007 Posts: 2206 Status:

Hidden in that wall is a time capsule which contains a few mobile phones (which were broken but repairable), a bit of loose change, a couple of village magazines, a newspaper and a few other odd items that were rumbling about in the van at the time.

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