Two Cairns

Sometimes you need a break from work.  Strangely, I often find that when I am taking a break from work , I end up doing exactly what I do for work- playing with stones.  

Anuhea and I took a bit of time off from paid work to join in a challenge with our friend and fellow waller Dario.  The goal was to assemble a cairn from pieces of quartz found on his property.  Quartz is a very unforgiving medium, slippery stuff that shifts when you look away from a stone you thought was set.  To make it more of a challenge, we were attempting to build it without any stone shaping.  No hammers and chisels, please.

Working quickly by eye, we paired a few perfect placements with an equal number of compromises.  The plan shifted to a flat top as we ran out of quartz as we neared the end, and a boulder crowned it nicely.  We also ended up compromising on the hammers and chisels as the stone supply dwindled, converting larger stones into stones that were a more appropriate size for top.  

It was a lovely challenge, and a good break from linear walls.

Below is a cairn from earlier this spring, built in a couple of hours at our local co-op.  The previous one was falling apart, so I decided to try a different sort of challenge- a herringbone cairn.  For each course, I stood the stones up vertically, spaced apart a finger or two in width, and then gleefully knocked them into place like a circle of dominos.  It should hold up for a while.

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