The builders took a couple of hours this morning and coursed out all of the stone that was delivered yesterday. “Coursing out” means sorting the stones into groups that are all the same height, i.e. stones that can be used to build a single course.
For each stone, you identify the front face and then measure it’s height with a tape measure. For some reason, this is all done in inches.
This makes building with this sort of stone much quicker as the labourers aren’t hunting around searching for the right size stone. It also means that you might not start a course of a particular size, if you can see that you don’t have enough stones. You can get the stone yards to supply the stones already sorted and bagged according to their size. However, many builders prefer to do it themselves.
It took the builders a couple of hours to course out all the stone that was delvered yesterday. It is sorted into piles according to the height of the stone (with it’s front face forward).
All the stones in these rows have a height of 7.5 inches. There is a clue on the brick in the background.