Recent Stone Piles

Placing stone in ordered piles is deeply satisfying to me.  Physical exertion that changes chaos to order is its own reward.  Then the question will it last waits for an answer.  Years of inactivity here has allowed the gravel bank to reach a condition of stability.  One cannot walk here without sliding downhill with the stones that move when stepped on.  It seems an unlikely place to try to build a stone wall if permanence is the goal.  The purpose of a wall on the slope of a gravel bank is not immediately obvious either.

Gravel has many uses on our homestead.  Our driveway was built in part with gravel from this glacial deposit.  Time, a shovel and a wheelbarrow moved several cubic yards of gravel from here to the new driveway.  Large unusable stones unearthed while mining gravel needed a final resting place away from the area being worked.  A wall consumes large quantities of stone in a rather small place.  So the waste stone was pushed into the side of the gravel bank creating a narrow road.  More rubble was dumped here leveling the new surface.  In time this new road may climb to the top of the gravel bank.

This stone pile holds the material left over from the wall built near the road.  Little extra effort is needed to pile the stone rather than simply throwing it in a heap.  It looks to me like there is sufficient good stone here to build an extension on the wall near the road.  Universal support for this new project is lacking.  Some feel that the wall looks great as it is and that further work might mess things up.  Then the matter of the seam between the completed wall and the new extension is an issue.  It will be interesting to see what happens when the frost leaves the ground and another season of outside work begins.

This little project will likely remain unfinished.  Age has made it less smart for me to push wheelbarrow loads of gravel up hill to the driveway.  Hauling stone in a cart behind my lawn tractor destroyed its transmission.  I thought a ramp to permit the gravel to be rolled into the pickup truck represented a solution.  Becky felt that a more powerful tractor was a better solution.  She was right.  Now these stones need a new home.  Some of them a so large that I can only safely move them down hill.   They may just remain where they are.

Becky says about the stone wall down by the road "I rest my case."