Wall repairs – Cotswold dry stone walls

15 metres of wall running North-South on the edge of this old residence, whose previous owners used to own the fields that the extensive estate houses around Cam now sit upon, had become to fall. For years it came to rely upon concrete poles set deep into the ground to support it but even these were now not doing that job.

The concrete posts that were holding the wall up were pushed over themselves.

The wall was extending beyond the concrete posts and beginning to breakup and fall.

I took down the remains of the existing wall to the ground, digging out all of the old foundation including the sections that had been concreted into place. This all needed to come out so that I could run the largest stone across the width of the wall to provide a very stable base.

On the right side of this Trench is a lump of concrete which had to be smashed out to lay a deep foundation stone across the wall width.

Once the foundations were set I started to rebuild using the largest stone lower in the wall. It became clear early on that the old stones were very difficult to ‘work‘ with a hammer (to alter their shape) so my task was to place them unaltered into the wall. I love this walling method ….. so much 3 dimensional thinking 🙂

Above ground now. Lowest stones lower in the wall.

After removing all of the concrete fence poles, creating stable foundations, using sized, unaltered stones, over about 4 weeks – straddling Christmas 2019 – I finished building this wall In early January 2020.

A closeup of the courses in this dry stone wall in Cam, near Dursley.

Another angle of the complete dry stone wall including the sign of Prince of Walls to show the passing public who did the work.

This was my second piece of work on this residence, having completed some work on the Southern boundary in 2018.

Unfortunately the Northern boundary will fall in the next few years so their will be more to show …..

My customers are very happy yet again …. please look at my website: www.princeofwalls.com to see more of my work.

Towards the end of 2019 I completed the reconstruction on a 30 metre wall on the outskirts of Stroud that I had been working on for about 7 weeks. The photo below is a view of the finished article.

The wall before I rebuilt it was in a bad state. In some places it had fallen completely to the ground, in other places in had imploded in on itself due to vegetation growing through it. For instance, one of these places had the wall at only 3 ft high but about 6ft wide!

Trees planted beside the wall were also severely impacting on it. In all areas the foundations were disrupted so I took the wall down to below ground level and I relayed the foundations along the entire length.
In many cases I got around the tree root problems with rerouting or with subtle sympathetic amputations but the very large tree had such a vast root that I could only maintain a reasonable joining route by using timber lintels to bridge the root system. You can see this near the top of the slope.

All of the Work was done without the aid of any machine e.g. digger, nor any power tool.

Below are a few pictures are of the wall before I dismantled it and also during the rebuild.