Last Summer

  Just a shot of the wall we built at the Turner Farm on North Haven last year.  This is only about a third of the structure.  I think we would need a small plane for some good aerial photography to get the whole thing.

Stone Shapes

  I am reading an interesting book by Robert M. Thorson called Exploring Stone Walls, A Field Guide to New England's Stone Walls. I thought I would share this bit about the shapes of stones from pages 25-26. There are "eight categories of basic shapes common to stones found in New England Walls:
Blocks are equant and angular.
Balls are equant and rounded.
Prisms are columns that are angular.
Rollers are columns that are rounded.
Books are tablets that are angular.
Disks are tablets that are rounded.
Slabs can be either angular or rounded, but are normally subangular.

Blades are usually angular."

Curtis Fields

  Earlier this week my lovely and thoughtful fiance brought me home a couple of books on stonemasonry from the library, one of which was a thin little volume called The Forgotten Art of Building a Stone Wall by Curtis P. Fields. A Yale graduate and retired director of the Yale University Alumni Fund Association, Fields and his wife spent their last years on Penny Wise, their 200 hundred-acre farm in Vermont, where he learned to rebuild the miles of stone walls that snaked around the property.
  The book is touching in Fields' genuine enthusiasm and appreciation for the craft of stone wall building, but otherwise uninformative and at times, misleading.  His knowledge of stone wall construction basically came from the teaching of an old Vermonter, one Mr. Littlefield. This Mr. Littlefield taught him to split stone using wedges and how to stack flat rocks on top of one another, but that is pretty much the extent of it. Fields recommends the use of flat stones and doesn't even approach the art of round-rock wall building.
  I was intrigued by the descriptions and photos of the hand-tools they used to split stone with in the fields, particularly the long chisel used to "drill" holes with. The product of the modern age that I unfortunately am, I have never drilled a hole in stone with anything other than a hammer drill; and I am now on the hunt for a good drill chisel. All in all, it was an enjoyable one-hour read--being a short, illustrated 61 pages in length--but I wouldn't run out searching for a copy or add it to my personal library.

Postscript
That being said; Mr. Fields, (who passed away shortly after the writing of his book and who may be up there somewhere reading this) your passion for stonework is noted and appreciated, as is the effort you put forth in the writing of your guide. I hope you are building stone walls in the great beyond and I hope the stones are lighter there than they are here.

Mending Wall

Mending Wall

by Robert Frost

Something there is that doesn't love a wall,
That sends the frozen-ground-swell under it,
And spills the upper boulders in the sun,
And makes gaps even two can pass abreast.
The work of hunters is another thing:
I have come after them and made repair
Where they have left not one stone on a stone,
But they would have the rabbit out of hiding,
To please the yelping dogs. The gaps I mean,
No one has seen them made or heard them made,
But at spring mending-time we find them there.
I let my neighbor know beyond the hill;
And on a day we meet to walk the line
And set the wall between us once again.
We keep the wall between us as we go.
To each the boulders that have fallen to each.
And some are loaves and some so nearly balls
We have to use a spell to make them balance:
'Stay where you are until our backs are turned!'
We wear our fingers rough with handling them.
Oh, just another kind of out-door game,
One on a side. It comes to little more:
There where it is we do not need the wall:
He is all pine and I am apple orchard.
My apple trees will never get across
And eat the cones under his pines, I tell him.
He only says, 'Good fences make good neighbors'.
Spring is the mischief in me, and I wonder
If I could put a notion in his head:
'Why do they make good neighbors? Isn't it
Where there are cows?
But here there are no cows.
Before I built a wall I'd ask to know
What I was walling in or walling out,
And to whom I was like to give offence.
Something there is that doesn't love a wall,
That wants it down.' I could say 'Elves' to him,
But it's not elves exactly, and I'd rather
He said it for himself. I see him there
Bringing a stone grasped firmly by the top
In each hand, like an old-stone savage armed.
He moves in darkness as it seems to me~
Not of woods only and the shade of trees.
He will not go behind his father's saying,
And he likes having thought of it so well
He says again, "Good fences make good neighbors."

Decisions

Last week we decided to reduce the wall's height by about a foot and add a row of uprights along the top. This coping really brought the whole wall together. It gave it a finished appearance, unified the entire structure, and reminded me of some of my favorite pictures of the sheep walls of Ireland and Scotland. We finally felt as if we were ready to start building.