Dry Stone Walling Workshop Jan 4 -11 2011
At the Stone Foundation's annual Stone Symposium, organized by Tomas Lipps and held again this year in Ventura California, there was a challenging nine day dry stone wall workshop where four instructors representing four different nationalities worked with participants from across the United States in order to demonstrate rather differing approaches to walling without mortar. It was instructive to see how varied the training was and what things were deemed more important than others.
Above is a photo of the nearly completed twenty-five foot section of workshop wall built under the skilled leadership of DSWA master craftsman dry stone waller Sean Adcock from Wales.
The section of nearly completed wall (seen above) was taught by Justin Money. About Us - Irish Rock Art, Inc. Justin is living in New England now ( Kent, CT. ) but tells us this style of wall is representative of a more Irish way of coursing and building a wall. Justin learned to wall when he was growing up in the west of Ireland.
The section of the wall workshop above was taught by Lluc Mir from Mallorca Spain. The copes have not yet been set. The strong diagonal lines of structure and energetic look of this section created a contrast with the Welsh and Canadian sections flanking it so that even people who knew little about dry stone walls noticed a difference.
It was gratifying too to see that all the effort and skill that went into this project ended up producing a unified sturdy 100 foot long span of 8 foot high retaining wall incorporating tons and tons of hefty local random sandstone material graciously donated by Larry Mosler of the Ojai Rock Quarry located an hours drive from Grant Park where this special walling event took place. All the students rotated between instructors, (and between sections) at half day intervals.
Above is a photo of the wall showing the 'Canadian section' flanked by Spain and Ireland.