ferryoons

By ferryoons

This is not any old wall end

You could walk past this and think, if you paid attention to the wall at all, that's a bit knackered. Look again.

Pretty much anything of age in this place is made of sandstone. Some of the stones were carefully selected, shaped and sized, as you can see. The rest of the structure was built using whatever came to hand. Most stones in this wall have been picked off a pile, turned this way and that, maybe discarded  for the next course, eventually chosen to fit a space. Look at them one by one, and imagine doing it yourself.

Some stones are really very small, grabbed off the discards pile to fill an annoying gap. At least these examples are rectangular. The walls of the house we are renovating (or would be renovating if work weren't stopped for Covid-19) have the wee gaps filled with little more than rounded pebbles. That's called random rubble. I must admit, our house puts the random into rubble. Specialists are awaited to fix where a roof leak has washed all the mortar out. 

Modern cement is death to sandstone, the chemicals in the mortar eroding the stones. What you have here is lime mortar, which bonds well and breathes with the stone. As you can see it weathers over time, but this wall is old.

You can warm to this, can't you? Unlike breeze blocks and other modern rubbish?

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