I spent a couple of days recently working on the same job site as John Shaw-Rimmington. John is a waller practicing the ancient craft of building dry stone walls. Most of the stone work that we encounter in this part of the world is held together with mortar whereas his structures are held together by nothing more than careful placement and gravity. This mortarless method is prevalent in many parts of the British Isles, where John was born. 
The work I was doing (painting the interior of the cottage) resulted in something aesthetically pleasing that will last for several years. The wall that John built was beautiful in a deep elemental way, and it should have a lifespan of more than a hundred years. Hadrian’s Wall which still stands in parts of Britain was built of dry stone around 120 AD.
The basic principles of stone building are simple enough. First, have plenty of stone on hand to choose from, then build a wall wider at the bottom than the top. Each stone is angled back slightly from those below it, creating a taper or batter toward the top ( about one inch per foot of height). Follow the pattern of placing one stone over two and two stones over one. John looks for the plane or face of each stone and orients it to the outside. Beyond the fundamentals, stone walling is a creative matter of linking the visual with the physical. As John likes to say, "It is sort of like thinking with your hands."
After the work was done in the evening, we sat down to play a game of Scrabble. I quickly learned that John loves words as much as he loves stones. John opened the game with T-E-D-I-O-U-S and began to share his zeal for walling with me. "I think that it is true, that stone is the building material of the future," he said glancing up for a moment. "Did you know that the words stone and notes use the same letters?" After a series of unfulfilling jobs, John (like many of us) came to his passion later in life. He found employment with a skilled mason, building mortared stone foundations for log houses. In his spare time, John was raising Highland Cattle on his farm near Uxbridge. When he started imagining his cattle fenced with stone walls just like in their native Scotland, imagination turned into dry stone fences and in the process John learned this aspect of the masonry craft.
"It’s all about visual conception," he explained "you are constantly referencing your stone pile, restraining yourself from using a stone that will be more useful later on." Sounds like Scrabble , I thought to myself. Then having found a strategic opening, John placed V-E-X on the Scrabble board for a score of 48 points. "If you work with the concept that every stone has a place, it frees you to discover each stones use."
"John founded the Dry Stone Walling Across Canada to promote the art of dry stone building in this country. (www.dswac.ca) and regularly teaches one day seminars for beginners. He currently organized Canada’s first Dry Stone Wall Festival in Port Hope on Thanksgiving Weekend. He lined up two Master Craftsmen from Scotland and a Jazz band for the event. The centrepiece was the construction of a permanent dry stone footbridge spanning a small creek. Check the website out for details.
David Sheffield is a freelance writer photographer and mediocre Scrabble player. He lives with his family in Baltimore Ontario. Feel free to contact him at dsheff@wildmail.com.
-- This is an article in the October issue Number 120 of a Southern Ontario Magazine called The Link