Dry-Stone walling

Depending on which part of the country you go to, there’s a different technique for dry-stone walling. It actually makes walls pretty interesting (as walls go), because no two are quite the same.

Okay, so I just admitted I find walls interesting. Don’t judge me too hard. There’s actually a bit of an art to making dry-stone walls, and I see the whole process as actually more of an elaborate and slightly clunky jigsaw puzzle. Obviously, stones don’t fit together quite as nicely as jigsaw pieces, but if you do a bit of jiggling, they can look really rather neat at the end of the day.

Image from The Stone Trust

At Durlston, because we rebuild/fix walls using the stone that came from the previous section, the pieces are always a bit of a mess. You get lots of different pieces of different shapes, sizes and rock types, each of which has a different purpose.

The main part of a wall (at least, the bit you see) is called the face. These are big-ish stones that hopefully have a smooth(ish) side to them that you can put on the outside of the wall, and make it sort of neat. You build in layers, and try and keep each layer kind of flat, or compensate with the layer above/below to try and keep the wall neat. Joins in one layer should have a stone placed over them on the next layer, so there aren't any weak sections where long joins run across a few different layers.

You have two faces, one each side. The bit in the middle is called the hearting. The hearting I think is my favourite part to do, because it’s made up from lots of little random pieces of stone, which you jam into the gaps to make the middle of the wall nice and strong.

Then the last bit of the wall is the cappers. These are the stones that go on the very top, to finish off the whole thing. In Dorset, the cappers stand upright, although you can also have flat ones, or cement (but that’s kinda cheating). We only cement at Durlston in the really well-used parts of the park, to make sure the walls last a long time; other parts, you just squeeze the capping stones together tightly and normally they hold pretty well.

There are some other bits too, like throughstones, but those sorts of things depend on whether you have the stone to make them, or the sort of wall you're working on!

The height of the wall is also kinda important when you're building it, even from the base. Higher walls tend to be much thicker (60cm width), whereas small walls can be thinner, around 50cm wide. And then they also taper towards the top, which stops them from falling over. Even tapering to 45cm wide is better than none at all!

So today, today was my first time walling in over a year I think! I've been going on-and-off for the past five years, and we're always working on a different piece of the park, and different types of wall. Today it was a few small sections that needed finishing off round the carpark; so the top few layers, then capping. These sections will get cemented later, so they didn't have to be too perfect on top, but it's always nice to get things pretty. I forgot how dirty work walling can be (really, really dirty), so came home after the three hours coated with dust. Absolutely, like, all my clothes are chalky white now!