After an impromptu hiatus...

Whoops, I let this slip a little. Summer has been so busy though; I've been out enjoying the lovely weather, rather than being inside writing! It's not so nice today though (rather grey), so time to re-start this little project of mine.

Hopefully this will give me a few things to write about in the next few weeks though, with a stack of things I've done. Also, lots of photos.

The thing I've done most this week, on my few days off, is rock balancing. It seems like a bit of a weird thing to do, but after an afternoon wander to Peveril Point a couple of weeks ago, I had the idea when someone else had left a couple of piles of rocks. They weren't especially difficult, but looked really cool. So, when I had nothing else to do at the start of this week (and the weather was nice), what better to do than head out to the point again and give it a go myself?

As a kid, I tried this a couple of times on Chesil Bay, which is a bit of a way down the coast, and has much more prevalent rock than Swanage beach. Unfortunately, I was pretty terrible at it, so never gave it another thought after then. Turns out I am actually fairly good at it once I get started though... As I was working on some of the taller stacks (11 is my current top number of rocks balanced on one another), it struck me how similar it was to dry stone walling. You have to find the right rock to balance (just like the right rock for the hole to fill in a wall), otherwise it's not right.

I did start to get a little bit carried away with it, and ended up making quite a lot of stacks the first day. There were a lot of comments too as I was working, near the end, as some of the stacks were fairly tall, and balanced on quite precarious edges!

 There are different techniques to rock balancing apparently, as a quick google afforded me that evening when I had come back and was uploading my pictures. The technique I had been using was called 'pure balance'; each rock is in near-point balance on one another. If you take the top rock off, the rest of the stack's still okay (unless you knock it). Another techinque some of the better rock balancers use is called 'counter balance' though, which affords some impossible looking structures, with rocks balanced at crazy angles. If you take off one rock, the rest is likely to fall.

The next day I used more angular rocks, which gave me a few crazy stacks like the one above. There were more impressive stacks I made, but forgot to take pictures. By the end of the day, I had ended up with 24 of my own stacks, and 1 other that someone had made overnight, apparently inspired by my own left-over creations!

Unfortunately the next day I went to try and stack rocks, it was much too windy and every pile I tried ended up falling over only a few minutes after I'd managed to put them together. A lot of the stacks I had left the day before had gone too, so I called it a day fairly quickly. When the conditions improve a bit more though, no doubt I'll be out there again!