Building with Native Stone

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Building

With the wall laid out and the footing trench dug, the real challenge begins Now you can start building. You will quickly agree that the more bricklike its shape, the easier a rock is to fit in. But save your heaviest thin stones to make a fine, flat top. Put your biggest and worst stones in the trench, rottenest side down. You may have to dig out holes at the footing bottom to accommodate the bumps ("wobbleknobs") in the real stinkers.

Try always to make the top of each course—even the underground ones—level and even, the sides parallel and square. Where you have a lot of little stuff you must use, try to alternate stacked thin rocks with thick single ones in a course, putting layers of thin rocks on each side of a single thick one, and avoiding backing multiple thins against each other where possible (see Fig. 6). Stacked thins will slide over one another, permitting the whole wall to slip off itself . . . much as a deck of cards will slough over when pushed with the palm of your hand.

Here your affinity for the craft and your own style will begin to develop. You may find it more satisfying to lay the entire bottom course first . . . or you may want to lay multiple courses, always keeping the lower courses out ahead of the upper by a few stones. Some folks find in their character a persuasive need to leave a minimum of open space, so they work for hours to create as closed and bricklike a wall as they can . . . others can tolerate a lot of gaps . . . still others like gaps, but will want to fill them with rubble and shims The wall won't care which way you choose, provided the bigger rocks are laid properly

Do it however your sense of order dictates: The wall will stand for a century or two (so long as you truly enjoy one another's company). But—fair warning—you may find, once you've tried it for a bit, that you just don't like wall building. It is hard, often sweaty labor that can leave you sore, bleeding, and grubby. Rock is a coarse artistic medium, demanding little fine motor control and permitting few precise furbishes. If you don't like it, if you find that you don't get real intellectual gratification from turning a rock pile into the beginnings of a proper wall, don't force yourself. Fill your trench with compost, and plant asparagus . . . which will provide satisfactions of a different sort.

The Following Courses

O nce the base course is laid, the fun of making a wall grow before your eyes begins. And we come to a few more basic rules of wall building. For one, you don't set or lay stones, you drop them (from a small height). Try to lay them in gently atop one another and you'll soon crush a finger in the middle. So drop the rock and move your hands out from under . . . quick.

And always lay stones as flat as possible, and according to the old-time formula: one-over-two, two-over-one (see Fig. 7). Put another way, always cover an up-facing joint between two rocks with the solid undersurface of another. This rule applies in the vertical dimension, as well: Put one beside two beside one, and so on.

Finally, no proper wall builder ever hefts a rock more than once. All the selecting and adjusting is done mentally beforehand. I am told that there are some wags who maintain that we stoneworkers just never own up to lifting a rock more than once . . . but they're most likely folks who've watched from a distance but never hoisted a stone themselves. And anyone who can watch a mason at work and resist the urge to pitch in for a while—at least long enough to learn the facts—is not to be believed in any event.

Avoiding Runs and Tying

I f you fail to cover too many joints, you'll create vertical run, and the wall will fold at the crease (see Fig. 8). Properly lapped, the rocks in a dry wall will shift with the seasons but not fall out too quickly.

From time to time, and as the rock permits, tie the faces of your wall. That is, lay a long rock crossing the width of the wall, so as to cover all the rocks in the course below, as shown in Fig. 9. This adds lateral stability.

Some builders like to pull in giant rocks that will fill an entire section, interrupting the courses and forming a solid pier. Presumably this helps stabilize the wall by reducing lengthwise, along-wall shift. Personally, I feel that a giant in a wall invites fall-out the same as excessive run, but experienced masons don't always agree. (Indeed, I'd say that they tend to disagree more often than not.)

Another topic of dispute is chinking: Do you chink in or out? That is, when rock surfaces don't mate well or where there is a substantial gap in a face, do you fill these holes with shim rocks laid big end inside the wall (chinked "out")? Or do you hammer in a wedge-shaped shim from the outside (chinked "in")? I do it both ways and so will you, I imagine, though chinking out takes the most time.

As you build, try to imagine the effect of gravity on each rock as you place it, setting each stone so as best to keep gravity pulling straight down on your wall. I like to have the rocks in all the courses angling down slightly toward the center of the wall: that is, to have rocks in each face slope in and down toward the midline a bit. Not always possible, but a help in aiding the wall to hold itself together.

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