A special hands-on dry stone workshop was held on September 3rd and 4th, at Ferris Provincial Park not far from Toronto Ontario near Campbellford where students learned about building a permanent dry stone wall and also got experience restoring one of the existing historic walls at the park. Here is our DSWAC instructor's report.
Arriving at 7 am I began stripping down a section of the historic Ferris Park walls. During dismantling, the system of the old wall builders became apparent. Larger stones were placed on the outside and were angled steeply inwards. The base was quite wide which was able to accommodate immense amounts of smaller rubble, called hearting. The combination of the stones angled steeply inwards, along with the immense amount of hearting, is detrimental to the structure of freestanding walls, particularly when a wall has more hearting than the mass of individual building stones. During this process it was decided to narrow the wall width, increase its height, use bonding tie-stones, all the while laying stones level. There is no evidence of vertical cope stones in these parks, so horizontal coping was chosen, despite that it is not as structural as vertical coping.
Thankfully, Sunday was not nearly as hot, and all students came back eagerly to finish the wall. Through stones were placed, only poking through at the forest side (leaving a laird side for the park visitors) and by 4:00 pm the final coping stones were laid in place! Students had just finished cleaning up, congratulatory photos were taken, certificates of completion by the Friends of Ferris Park were handed out, and the heavens opened up and rained poured down - a wonderful end to a beautiful day under ominous weather forecasts!