We had a real mountain of stone left over when we demolished the old barn. It was of little use when re-building the extension, but since it had been here for the last 200-300 years, we didn’t really want to get rid of it. So the big question is what do you do with around 250 tons of old stone?
We are still “raiding” this pile of stone left over from the renovation to rebuild and repair different bits of our dry stone walls.
Our first call was to build a “sheep pen” around the mountain of stone. This would give us somewhere to park various bits of machinery where it was out of site. In the short term, it would also be a good spot to store horse manure/compost. And who knows, eventually even some sheep!
The next step was to re-build the wall in the top field along the boundary with the lower field. There had been a wall here previously, but I suspect that it was built a little too close to the edge of the escarpment and it just end up as a pile of stones along the edge of the bottom field. This old wall can still be seen in places. The new wall is just a little back from the edge, so hopefully the same fate will not await our new wall.
I reckon by the time that we have finished this wall that most of the mountain of stone will have disappeared (or rather, been repurposed!).