Category: dry stone walling (Page 1 of 7)

A little while ago we were wondering what we were going to do with the pile of stone from the old barn. Now, it has almost all gone.

There was a fair mixture of stone in this pile. To be fair, most of it was pretty good walling stone so it didn’t take long to build some new stone walls in the top field.

We started building a sheep pen around the pile of stones – partly to hide it and partly to use up the stone. It soon became obvious that we had to think of something else to do with the stone.

Over the last few weeks we have made good progress on the remaining dry stone walls. We haven’t got much to do now. Which is just as well, since there isn’t much of our mountain of stone left!

Once we turn the corner, this wall in the top field will join up with the old wall in the bottom field. Then all of our stone will have been used up. Well, at least that is the plan!

We have always dug all of the footings for our dry stone walls by hand – not this time! We just happened to have access to a machine (and a man who knows how to drive it). It only took a couple of hours to do what might have taken a couple of days by hand. We used our old trusty dumper to move the soil elsewhere. It is probably a good 30-40m run.

We are using our old dumper to move this stone from the mountain to the other end of the field. The stone is pretty reasonable walling stone (even if some of it is a little big!), so the wall goes up pretty quickly.

When we had the digger here we used it to lift some of the bigger stones into the dumper. I then dumped these along the wall to go into the foundations of the wall. Although many of them were too heavy to lift, I can just about roll them into position. Zep is lying in the grass by the red trug in the background.

This is the view from the other side of the wall looking up from the bottom field. It doesn’t look too bad, although it does feel bigger and taller when viewed from this side.

Almost there! Which is just as well since we don’t seem to have much stone left! It is amazing to think that most of this wall used to the old barn.

It was a bit daunting when we started this job, but at least the stones didn’t have to be moved far!

We came out about 4m from the existing wall (and at the same height). Now it is time to turn the corner! We built this wall about 1.5m at a time – each time digging the footings by hand and then taking the stones from in front of us to build this wall. This way we managed to build the wall “through” the mountain of stone.

The foundations of the wall are built on top of the subsoil – we dig a trench to remove all of the turf and top soil. This means that the foundations are out of sight – this is a good place to loose some of the old bits of concrete block and old bricks. It provides a good solid base without using up good stone. The footings are all dug by hand.

The buckets are full of smaller stones that are used to “pack out” the middle of the wall. You’ll be amazed at how much stone can be used up doing this and how stable the smaller stones make the whole structure. While I get to put the bigger stones in place, Jo gets to work fill the centre of the wall behind me.

We progressively worked our way building through the mountain of stone. You can see where the “mountain” used to be because there was no grass under the mountain. We are now using some orange string to provide a guide for the top of the wall. Our aim is to build this wall to the same height as the old wall behind.

We are going to stop building the sheep pen and turn our attention to building the wall along the top edge of the field. If we have any stone left over, we may come back here and build out the pen a little more. But for now, we are done here. You can just see the top of the stone pile behind the wall.

We are still “raiding” this pile of stone left over from the renovation to rebuild and repair different bits of our dry stone walls.