The second part of our deep dive into building a Dry Stone Wall. Here we try and explain the importance of joint crossing, how to plan ahead with walling and how to go about making it strong internally.
I'm from Siberia, Russia, I"ve never put any stone to any dry wall. I have no idea why I'm watching it, but I can not stop. Thanks for your work it's really awesome.
@@drystone-tv out of interest with decent stone, how much could a good man wall in a day. in the previous video you mentioned 8 ton, which speaks of around 2 cube, so a couple of meters run maybe? thx
@@jukeseyable a good Waller with good stone could do 4m² in a day no problem. There's a ton per meter so with a take down and rebuild that's 4 ton twice. The majority of walling that happens in the UK is rebuilding old walls so that's where that number comes from. Building a wall from scratch out of fresh stone is a lot slower and a good Waller would probably only do 2m² a day .
I'm from the Yorkshire Dale's but now live on the border of Thailand, Myanmar and Lao. One of the few things I miss seeing here, are Yorkshire built dry stone walls. I've seen them most every day all my life and always found them amazing and a testament to the skills of the guys/women who built them. Thanks for this little taste of home!
This video is boring... unless you're building a dry stack stone wall! Thank you for this well-done video. I'm grateful for the opportunity to learn, without having to travel.
I'm 65 and wish I could tackle this! Your video is not boring at all. I feel blessed to sit and watch your amazing work. Seems like I'm right there with you! Interested in a video using small stones. Thank you for sharing this information in such a conversational way.
I love it. You folks are awesome. I love the top tips. Really concise, simple and clear. Especially, if you're spending 5 minutes on a stone, it's the wrong stone. That's excellent advice, for walling, and probably for life as well.
I worked for a pair of stone masons 40 years back . I was the labourer. When they let me build my first wall one of them walked on it when it was half way up . He said it passed .great videos
I am in the process of building on a mountain. The mountain is made of granite. I plan to use your techniques here to try my hand at using thousands of tons of granite into dry stone walls.
I'm doing some dry stone walling here in Ireland, I just came across this video and I think it's great. Well done and keep promoting your craft, it's not too many people who know how to build or repair these walls, well except old farmers here in Ireland but still a lost trade, congrats.
great stuff....dry stone walling down on Dartmoor with granite....different style but same principles......awesome videos...really appreciate you going to the effort of making them!!!
Your craftmanship is beautiful and the content is excellent. Hope you keep educating us all. I love the close ups of you dressing the stone. Cheers from Canada!
I once tried to repair a very old, slightly collapsed wall of a rustico in italy. This was impossible without any prior knowledge. The stones there are smaller and it's a real handicraft and even there there aren't that many people who can do it anymore. Thanks for sharing your knowledge.
I went to Bolton Abbey in Skipton, Bradford recently. I was amazed that the church shell structure has been without a roof for 400+ years and it looks strong as though it was destroyed less than a decade ago. As I looked at the stone wall boundary fence at the roadside, I noticed that the wall had three parts: Two parallel outer and inner walls and the gap between them filled up with mortarred heartings/fillings. The inner wall, at the open exit however, was pulling away from the joining center. Since I had watched your videos and believed in your method of overlapping stones, it was like further validation of your style. I have never built a stone wall but I hope to, one day, God willing, and I will build like you have tutored me. I hope I will be able to give feedback to my tutor. Thanks a million for sharing.
Had the dubious privilege as an American to live in Scotland for three years. During that time I became quite familiar with the ubiquitous stone dykes criss-crossing the land as evidently the country's main agricultural by-product is stone. I plan on building these types of walls on family property in the Ozarks as part of my retirement. Interestingly, we have these constructions featured on neighboring property but the walls themselves in the area are quite rare. Not for a lack of source material. I regularly refer to the land as: "a pile of rocks with some dirt and sticks scattered on it..." Thanks for the instruction as it is very informative and helpful
Haha great stuff! I love to see the Scottish dykes made out of crazy boulders. You should definitely build some walls on your property if you get the chance. Theres nothing like gathering up all the random stone lying around and making something useful out of it!
I'm so happy I found your channel, what a lost art! I'm in Canada and trying to learn hedgelaying and dry walling is on the learning list ❤. You guys are amazing!!!!
Thank you, this was awesome. Beautiful work. Your comments were so helpful for learning the principles of walling. I'm so interested to see this grow higher and the other principles. I'd love to see a video for dry walling a foundation for a home. I'm going to watch some more of your videos right now.
Thankyou so much! your video is so helpful thankyou..i am going to try to fix my friends wall for them as they can't move about too well and the sheep on the surrounding croft are getting into their garden so I'm so glad i found your video thanks for helping us to see the proper good ways to do things.. hugely appreciated
Thanks for your comment. It's been quite a challenge trying to translate my craft into joined up sentences people can understand! Glad you got something out of it , cheers
You might see from my picture - I have built a bit with Big Logs. Yesterday I did a very rough dry stone arrangement to make steps to access a public beach. After watching this - I know what mistakes I made. PS Cheers from South Africa.
Nice work ,subscribed. One of my least favourite myths about walling is "a good waller should never pick the same stone up twice" - usually from someone that's probably never picked a stone up in their life! Boils my piss! Do you hear that one much? (I'm a waller in Cumbria by the way)
Is this a vertically-faced wall, or is there a batter on it? I come from an estate in South Devon, where hedges are stone-faced earth banks, narrower on top, but wide enough for a huntsman's horse to stand on briefly as it jumps the hedge. My great-uncle was the equestrian etcher Geoffrey Sparrow, and he immortalised his brother, my grandfather, jumping a hedge on his grey horse in the 1930s or 1940s. Such hedges are wonderful for wildlife, and hedgerow trees grow for centuries. My father, an ex-Royal Navy submarine captain, who married into the estate, would put strands of barbed wire across a slipped hedge, but I would keep an eye out for demolitions, and do it properly in stone. We had our own diused quarry on the estate that had supplied shillet for barns and hedges. Our hedges were laid with thin vertical stones - but with better stone from buildings free at that time, I never tried vertical shillet myself. Very challenging, I would think! / In the 18th century, we owned huge limestone quarries in Plymouth, where from 1812-1841 we supplied 4.5 million tons of stone for Plymouth Breakwater. / With quarrymen available, in the 1860s, a new road was blasted out of the side of a steep wood, down to a new one arch bridge across the River Erme, to form a drive 3/4 of a mile downhill - great fun on a bike! The wall against the very steep hill was made of really quite small vertically laid shillet, laid in rows. and very attractive. In 1886, the Elizabethan monor house was demolished, and a cut limestone house built. / They certainly knew how to use stone in the past, and it breaks my heart to see stone dumped or crushed when it has centuries of use left in it. I never used any cement, even for setts laid in the ground, as if packed tightly with earth, they did not tend to move, and they can be lifted and reused at any time. / Which is to say I love stone! I am a natural healer, and working with stone is a perfect healing technique. City life and people are what harms, whereas the best of country lie and people heals. They rush about faster and faster, sicker and sicker, while anone with CommonZense does the precise opposite! Best wishes, Zen cz4m.blogspot.com/2018/07/cz4m-mission-statement.html#stt_mnu /
Fascinating. New Subscriber. I am American,so I have difficulty with your accent. I occasionally work on walls on my property. I am not even close to your talent mate. Cheers🍻🍻🍻🍻🍻🍻🍻🍻🍻🍻🍻🍻🍻🍻🍻🍻🍻🍻
I live somewhere with about the same weather as Moscow, hah, the frost line is almost 2m down, in your first video on foundations, you just talk about getting the organic soil off to get down to the mineral subsoil below, but what do you recommend as far as frost heave? If I have to dig the foundations down below the frost line, that's a huge amount of dirt to move, as well as more than double the stone I'd need for a 4-5' wall. Can I just take the top soil off instead? There are a bunch of 100+ year old stone walls in my area, that look more like they've had stone robbed from them, rather than theyve fallen over from frost heave, If you dont have experience with cold climate, I think I'll habe to disassemble a section and see of they have a deep foundation or not. Thanks again for the great videos. I've been fortunate enough to do several traditional apprenticeships, in wooden boat building and metal machining, and I'm fascinated by the "good stuff" that doesn't get written down in the books, and stone masonry is sort of the most famous as far as keeping the tricks secret, hah.
Thanks for the comment! It's an interesting topic and my knowledge is a bit limited on best practice in areas with serious frost heave. I've worked in Maine and Canada and over there the approach seemed to differ depending on the purpose of the wall. Sometimes they dug out 600mm or so and filled the hole with compacted gravel and built on that. In one extreme example, I worked on a job where the contractor dug down 2 metres and poured a 400mm thick concrete slab then topped it off with compacted gravel 1600mm. The foundation probably cost more than the actual wall in that case. Most times when I've worked over there we just took about 300mm out and filled with gravel. If you're happy that your wall will move a little bit then I think that's fine. It's more of a problem if you're building a retaining wall or something that needs to remain inert.
It's a little hard to follow some of what's said when English is not the primary language. Even my "CC" tool had trouble rendering much of what's said. I did, however, catch most of it. Very nice, indeed!!
This is incredible to watch and very informative. I’m curious, where do you find your stones? Did you have to get specific types or were they just laying around the yard? I’m wanted to build something similar but all I have is shale
i used to think the throughs were styles! are they used for that by people when getting about? or is it frowned on to use them for that? genuinely be useful to know the etiquette on that or should we always use gates etc?
I wonder, would you be interested in coming to New Zealand to work on a large (300m2) dry stone wall project? I can cover flights. Job is in the most beautiful part of the country Queenstown Lakes.
I'd definitely be interested to hear more about it! Always been a dream to go to New Zealand! Send me an email to info@noblestonework.com if you like. Nice one!
This is brilliant content lads. With through stones I’ve seen mentioned before that a through stone should be used at set distance in your wall (one a metre?) what do you think to that?
I would say 1per meter as a minimum. We put them in as often as we can spaced at regular intervals. Quite often we have 2 rows of throughs in at 900mm centers so will average more than 2 throughs per m². The measurements are a rough guide though ,
Lots of people saying that! I might invest in a good pair. I've tried the cheap ones in the past and they're very uncomfortable and obstruct your vision too much.
I love your videos! I live in the US in New England. My house, like many, have a stone foundation. (Mine is stacked, not motared). If someone wanted to build a house with a stone foundation, should it go below the frost line? Also, would you recommend pouring a concrete footer even though they didnt do that in the 1700s? Thanks in advance
You know, this is not really my exact area of expertise as we don't get much frost where I live. Old houses here are walled with dry stone directly onto the subsoil, however they can move over time which is why the medieval buildings in england can all look so wonky. I think to be on the safe side I would recommend pouring a concrete footer or try to seek the advice of a local restoration builder. Depending where you are in NE I might be able to put you in contact with someone. Cheers!
Very interesting, thanks. One question for you: is there a reason you don't use those chisels which have a flat plate at the end which protect your chisel hand from a misplaced blow from the hammer? Or are they just for noobs who aren't as accurate as experienced wallers who've been using hammers & chisels for years?!
Some stones are easier to shape than others for sure. Also make sure your tools are sharp and have a hammer that's heavy enough - 1.5kg or something. My advice in general to someone who is spending a lot of time shaping stone is to spend an extra 5 minutes looking for the right sized stone first. Eventually this will save you lots and lots of time.
There are good reasons why medieval and earlier stone walls, buildings and roads have lasted. In a country filled with stone construction, we’d be fools not to closely listen to those who - through construction experience, not some theory - know how that lasting bit has been achieved!
Hi, Why is there no foundation in your build? I'm from the Netherlands and our soil is no rock. Mostly earth, clay and sand. What would you recommend for a foundation for dry stone wall on such underground?
on my family farm about half of the walls are built directly onto the clay, the 200 year old walls have spread and moved a bit but it kind of gives them their character. I've also seen walls built on really boggy peat and they have huge flagstones underneath to stop the stones sinking into the bog. In most cases small dry stone walls dont need a concrete foundation
It’s sad that he feels like he has to justify providing the actual, experience derived, hands on knowledge of an ancient craft. I’ve spent my entire life believing that deep down inside every human had the intrinsic desire to dig a hole or build a wall, or a tree house. If I only knew now what I knew then.
I want to build a low, 2 ft retaining wall. Does it need to be built like a regular wall, with 2 sides, or just one face side with threw stones and batter? Hard to find any videos on dry retaining walls.
I really appreciate the obvious high level of drystone skills demonstrated in these videos. However, i am a little confused re your comments about movement of foundation stones. What you say appears logical. But...i see in Stonework a Technical Guide to standards and identification of common faults in drystone walling,( by Sean Adcock ) that it is stated that; 'none of the stones should wobble when walked upon'. Given that this non movement of foundation stone seems to be?? one of the key criteria in achieving DSWA certification I find it interesting that you appear to be dismissing the ' foundation stone standard' as ' a total load of crap/myth made up by people who weren't wallers in the first place'. 😳
My problem with it is that it doesn't take into account stone type or size. Large stones will rarely move when walked on no matter how badly they've been put in and small stones will always move no matter how well they have been put in. Its just one of those things where in the past I have seen people walk on foundations and it has just shown to me their lack of understanding of different situations.
@@drystone-tv Thanks for the clarification. Sean Adcock actually sums up (in the Guide) what i think you are saying with the old adage; "Rules are for the guidance of wisemen and the blind obedience of fools".
outside flat inside flat butting up on each other ;; spend no more than five mins on each stone ;if you are do better job selecting stone not manufacture them good info soon i hope to build a wall like a monument i can leave before i die
@@drystone-tv ummm, like, yes, ya'nomutIsayin? Lol! It's all good. It's a small thing but it can make a big difference, unless it's way outside of your character. As a public speaker, such placeholders degrade credibility. But entertainment is different. Keep doing your thing! Good show! Eh?
