Greetings to Milton Cemetery Wallers!
Thank you so much for all of your hard work and enthusiasm for the project! It is very much appreciated by me, Lisa and the Trustees of the Cemetery. We accomplished quite a bit in the two days of combined instruction and work.
In case you don’t remember, we:
- Learned the basics of dry stone wall construction;
- Toured a variety of stone wall styles in Milton (retaining wall, curved wall, inclined wall, granite roadside walls, some “haha’s” and an interesting mortared wall too!);
- Stripped out the dilapidated remnants of a 100+ year old stone wall made up mostly of jagged, angular ledge stone;
- Sorted out the usable stone from the potential hearting;
- Prepped and laid nearly 50′ of foundation;
- Learned about and used a variety of hand tools (and even got to split some granite with feathers and wedges!);
- Got a really good start on our second course;
This progress is even more impressive than it sounds, bearing in mind that we are using some above-average-sized fieldstone and are working in some seriously rugged field walling conditions!
We still have plenty of new stone to source and sort from the leaf pit and of course lots more wall to build!
I appreciate all that you have done and welcome any feedback you have for me or the project. And please let me know if you have any questions about where you would like to take your stone walling skills. I encourage all of you to explore the resources of the Stone Trust (https://thestonetrust.org/) to take your walling interest to new heights!
Best regards,
Mike
I will be in touch in the coming weeks to offer up additional days of walling, likely Fridays through Sundays.
P.S. Don’t forget to use your promo code to take advantage of your free membership in the Stone Trust. (Prior glitches have been addressed.)
P.P.S Photo Credits: Cathy Smith, Lisa Ahern and Liz Papile
You can read the Milton Cemetery Historic Wall Rebuild Project Description here.