Stone wall

“ Its light is like unto a stone most precious, and the materials of its structure are most costly; the building of the wall is of jasper, the city and the street of pure gold, and the foundations of the wall adorned with all manner of precious stones,574 while the several gates are each of a single pearl,—the mingled symbols of brilliancy, glory, costliness, and beauty. ”

“ The words are the ancientest language of trees—
They tell of how earth and air and light
Are wrought anew to beauty and to fruitfulness.
I feel the glad stirrings under her rough bark;
Her living sap mounts up to bring forth leaves;
Her great limbs thrill beneath the wand of spring.
This wall was builded in our fathers days—
Valorous days when life was lusty and the land was new.
Resemble the walls the builders, buffeted, stern, and worn. ”

“ The upper wall on the north side, where it remains perfect, formed the back of the wooden gallery over the corridors for the common people, and was faced with brick, but the greater part of the ancient brickwork had fallen down, and has been copied in modern times; a great deal of the back of the stone wall, left exposed, shews the hasty construction [155] , in the time of Gordianus. ”

“ It is clear that in this way each block or slab is made to provide the maximum of wall area at the expense of the thickness of the wall. Naturally, in districts where the rock is of a slabby nature blocks of a more or less uniform thickness lay ready to the builders' hand, and the appearance of the structure was much more finished than it would be in places where the rock had a less regular fracture or where shapeless boulders had to be relied on. ”

“ The outside is of such extraordinary workmanship that on a masonry wall about an ell in height there are placed stone slabs with a projecting edge, which form the support for an endless number of small white stones, the smallest of which are a sixth of an ell long, half as broad, and a quarter as thick, and which are as smooth and regular as if they had all come from one mould. ”

“ Arches one foot deep may be made in the wall for aumbries, or cupboards.
4. If one of two neighbours wishes to build a party wall of stone, and the other is too poor to join him, then the latter shall give the former three feet of his own land to build upon. But not for the purpose of narrowing or stopping any doorway, inlet, outlet, or shop.
5. If a man build a stone wall, at his own expense, sixteen feet high, his neighbour must make a gutter under the eaves of the house and so carry off the rain water. ”

“ They were far more durable than stone walls, which might be removed stone by stone with little more labor than was required to put them together; the concrete wall was a single slab of stone throughout its whole extent, and large parts of it might be cut away without diminishing the strength of the rest in the slightest degree. ”

“ In what is probably the earliest style of all, no tool seems to have been applied to the stone, but the rude masses are merely heaped on one another, taking care in the position of each successive block, to place it where it would most nearly fit into the work, and probably keeping the smoothest side outwards, to form the face of the wall ”

“ Sometimes the stone is scored with waved lines, or with small squares, or with nearly upright lines. The woodcuts illustrative of the masonry at Chester Holm, and of the Crypt at Hexham, to be introduced along with the account of these places, will exemplify some of these kinds of broaching. It was not until I had become tolerably familiar with the Wall, that my attention was called to this peculiar kind of tooling. ”

“ A wall is built by laying stone on stone. It may be torn down and built again, or left a ruin. The placing or overthrow of every stone occurs as just that event but once, never to return, but the stones, though chiseled or worn in the handling, remain constant material for constant use. ”

“ In the centre of each portal stands a strong upright stone, against which the gates have shut. Some of the large projecting stones of the exterior wall are worn as if by the sharpening of knives upon them ”

“ In many gardens an abrupt change of level makes a retaining wall necessary, and when I see this built in the usual way as a solid structure of brick and mortar—unless there be any special need of the solid wall—I always regret that it is not built as a home for rock-plants. An exposure to north or east and the cool backing of a mass of earth is just what most Alpines delight in. A dry wall, which means a wall without mortar, may be anything between a wall and a very steep rock-work, and may be built of brick or of any kind of local stone. ”

“ Small thin fragments of stone are wedged in between these where their junctures do not close tight, and so firmly are they fixed, that without instruments they may not be removed. One stone in the south wall is so large that we deemed it fully the task of from four to six men to move it when loose. ”

“ Dimension stone, flint, rubble, burnt or unburnt brick,--use them as you find them. For it is not every neighbourhood or particular locality that can have a wall built of burnt brick like that at Babylon, where there was plenty of asphalt to take the place of lime and sand, and yet possibly each may be provided with materials of equal usefulness so that out of them a faultless wall may be built to last forever. ”

“ The western portion of the wall of the ellipse has also suffered from the same cause. The amount of stone embraced in the outer walls is considerable, probably sufficient to construct walls of equal length, six feet broad and eight feet high. They now exhibit but slight evidence of ever having been regularly laid up, and more resemble mounds of stones rudely thrown together. The stones have been removed from a section of the central wall, to the base; but we have been unable to ascertain that the operation disclosed relics of any kind. ”

“ From the expense of carrying and working stone, the walls of buildings at a distance from a quarry, such for example as those in London, are seldom now built of solid stone, but a facing of this material is applied only on the external surface of the wall, which is built of brick. ”

“ South of the turnpike road, and behind a small house, called Beggar-bog, is a low freestone crag, which exhibits some quarry-like excavations, filled with the chippings of stone. It has probably furnished material for the Wall, the stone being of the same character.
The stream which we next cross is the Knag-burn; it forms the eastern boundary of Housesteads. Passing it, we scale the ramparts of this far-famed station. ”

“ A thatched and patched roof, with walls of alternate layers of turf and stone, and mid-walls or hallens of clay and straw, quite Egyptian manufacture, were all the go; and if any one, more advanced and uppish than his neighbours, got the length of a stone and clay wall, with a wooden partition within, he was deemed uncommonly appointed, as times went. ”

“ The stone walls sometimes seen are a sham, the stones being thin slabs nailed on the wooden framework of a house, like tiles or shingles, to rattle down in a harmless shower when the earth heaves and rocks. ”

“ Where exceptionally large blocks of stone are available they have been utilized in an upright position, and occur at greater or less intervals along the thin walls of dry masonry. An example of this use was seen in a garden wall on the west side of Walpi, where the stones had been set on end in the yielding surface of a sandy slope among the foothills. ”

“ The courses which form the plinth will be of hard stone, but you will observe that, except at the angles and for the air-holes, they are only a facing,—they are not parpings, that is, do not form the whole thickness of the wall. We have excellent rubble-stone, which, with the good mortar we employ, offers greater resistance to pressure than is required to carry two stories and a roof. Letting these rough stones tooth out on the inside we tie them better into the haunches of the barrel-vaults (Fig. 28) , and thus economise dressed stone. ”

“ Some stiles are constructed with a large flat stone projecting from each side, one slightly in front and overlapping the other, so that one can only pass through by making a very careful S-shaped movement. More common are the projecting stones, making a flight of precarious steps on each side of the wall. ”

“ His third tier, if not his second, will probably appear a sufficiently secure foundation for finer work; for if the earth yield at all, it will probably yield pretty equally under the great mass of masonry now knit together over it. So he will prepare for the wall itself at once by sloping off the next tier of stones to the right diameter, as 56 at d. If there be any joints in this tier within the wall, he may perhaps, for further security, lay a binding stone across them, e, and then begin the work of the wall veil itself, whether in bricks or stones. ”

“ When two neighbours shall have agreed to build between themselves a wall of stone, each shall give a foot and a half of land, and so they shall construct, at their joint cost, a stone 20wall three feet thick and sixteen feet in height. ”

“ And, although we are not hence to conclude that it is well to introduce courses of bad materials when we can get perfect material, I believe we may conclude with great certainty that it is better and easier to strengthen a wall necessarily of imperfect substance, as of brick, by introducing carefully laid courses of stone, than by adding to its thickness; and the first impression we receive from the unbroken aspect of a wall veil, unless it be of hewn stone throughout, is that it must be both thicker and weaker than it would have been, had it been properly coursed. ”

“ They are built entirely of rough stone, laid without mortar. I reckon on an average that each wall retains a terrace not more than twice its own height in width, and I do not think I saw a single breach in one of them unrepaired. ”

“ Gradually even in timber buildings the intervals of the main beams, which now became perpendicular, not throwing off their curved springers till they reached a considerable height, were occupied by stone walls, or where stone was expensive, by mortar or plaster, intersected by horizontal or diagonal beams, grooved into the principal piers. ”

“ Walling.—There are broadly speaking two classes of stone walling: rubble and ashlar. Rubble walls are built of stones more or less irregular in shape and size and coarsely jointed. Ashlar walls are constructed of carefully worked blocks of regular dimensions and set with fine joints.
Random Rubble (fig. 3) is the roughest form of stonework. It is built with irregular pieces of stone usually less than 9 in. thick, loosely packed without much regard to courses, the interstices between the large stones being occupied by small ones, the remaining crevices filled up with mortar. ”

“ Thus, bricks alternate with rolled pebbles in the old walls of Verona, and hewn stones with brick in its Lombard churches. A banded structure, almost a stratification of the wall, is thus produced; and the courses of more solid material are sometimes decorated with carving. Even when the wall is not thus banded through its whole height, it frequently becomes expedient to lay a course of stone, or at least of more carefully chosen materials, at regular heights ”

“ As already observed, the stations appear to have been built before the Wall, and as the necessity of the case required that they should be run up as quickly as possible, a smaller class of stone was allowed to pass muster here than was used in the Wall. The workmanship also is of inferior quality.
THE TOOLING OF THE STONES.
85 The front of the stones, both of the Wall and stations, is roughly ‘scabbled’ with the pick. In some parts of the line, this tooling takes a definite form; when this is the case, the marking called the diamond broaching is most common. ”

“ Walls.—A wall is an even and united fence, whether of wood, earth, stone, or metal. When meant for purposes of mere partition or enclosure, it remains a wall proper: but it has generally also to sustain a certain vertical or lateral pressure, for which its strength is at first increased by some general addition to its thickness; but if the pressure becomes very great, it is gathered up into piers to resist vertical pressure, and supported by buttresses to resist lateral pressure. ”

“ Whitaker gives, as the meaning of the word Procolitia, the ‘fortress in the woodlands.’ In the Gaelic tongue, coille signifies a wood.
199There is little in this station to detain us. The course of its ramparts and moats can be easily traced, and the rich green sward of its area is seen to cover numerous irregular heaps of ruins; every building, however, is prostrate; scarcely one stone is left upon another. The Wall forms the northern boundary of the station; its eastern and western gateways are, as usual, opposite to each other, but strike the side walls between the upper end and the middle. ”

“ This is the bricklayer; hear the thud
Of his heavy load dumped down on stone.
His lustrous bricks are brighter than blood,
His smoking mortar whiter than bone.
Set each sharp-edged, fire-bitten brick
Straight by the plumb-line's shivering length;
Make my marvelous wall so thick
Dead nor living may shake its strength.
Full as a crystal cup with drink
Is my cell with dreams, and quiet, and cool....
Stop, old man! You must leave a chink;
How can I breathe? You can't, you fool! ”

“ The wall runs down in crumbling cadence
Beside the brook which plays
Through the land like a silver harp.
A wind of ancient romance blows across the field,
A sweet disturbance thrills the air;
The silken skirts of Spring go rustling by,
And the earth is astir with joy.
Up the hill, romping and shaking their golden heads,
Come the little children of the wood.
From ecstasy to ecstasy the year mounts upward. ”