Thursday 1 July 2010

Coping with different Rock




Recently I was working with a group of trainees at the Scottish Lime Centre in Charlestown. One of the outstanding features of the site was that there was a wonderful collection of different types of stone. Our challenge was to extend the present wall using the type of stone available. You can possibly see from the first photo that we had various sandstones, bassalt, red and white marble, mudstone, granite all around for the main part of the wall. As an exercise we used bassalt kerb stones, mudstone and a yellowish sandstone on different sections of coping. It will be very interesting in the long term to discover how each of these sections stands up to the weathering. The group did a tricky job very well.
Thanks for a good couple of days to Alice, Colin, Fiona, Jill, Kenny and Stan. Also thanks to residents Steve and Tom for their preparation help and advice.

For more information about the Lime Centre and courses available go to http://www.scotlime.org/

2 comments:

tracey.blackwell said...

Looking at the profile, its a good thing the face stones are so well ended in that they almost meet in the centre. Leaves hardly any necessity for heartings as it appears that there were not many to be found with that tough stone!
Were the trainees allowed hammers on this one Norman?
Great job, tidy wall.

norman haddow said...

Hearting was no problem as much of the softer stone was not suitable for anything else.
As for cutting we were so fortunate to have the resident experts working alongside us. All the students were shown how to shape the sandstone copes which were very irregular.