Hamsterley, County Durham
First screened 16 March 2008

Well stoned

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Dry-stone waller John Stevenson, whose skills featured in this programme's reconstruction cameo, gives us a few behind-the-scenes tips on building a castle.

John Stevenson is the secretary of the Northumbrian branch of the Dry Stone Walling Association of Great Britain (www.dswa.org.uk). John has been teaching people how to build dry-stone walls for more than a decade and has trained 200-plus students in the craft. For the Time Team reconstruction cameo, John and fellow craftsman Michael Stephenson demonstrated some building techniques that would have been used on the Castles at Hamsterley, methods which have changed little over generations of wallers.

'The idea with Time Team was to demonstrate how our forbears built walls without the use of mortar. In effect we made a miniature structure, which used many of the techniques, skills and tools that would have been used in the past. We did a kind of sample piece which was some three feet (one metre) wide, five feet (1.5 metres) long and four feet six inches (1.2 metres) high.'

Structural ramp
John and Michael devised a structural ramp to enable them to move stone up to the top. John believes that this system would have made building towers a much more practical undertaking. 'We always assume that lots of scaffolding was used,' he says, 'but the fact is that you can build the wall in a way so that it actually becomes a kind of ramp for carrying the material up. You often find very small steps built into the end of a wall, and people have often wondered if they were hefty enough for carrying up all the stone, but I believe that ramping was used and that the small steps are just for use at the end. Unfortunately English Heritage didn't allow us to disturb the archaeology on site for me to be able to confirm the theory.'

The technique of building a dry-stone wall requires the building of two parallel faces of stone and filling in the cavity between with rubble (known as hearting). Large stones go right through the two faces of the wall at intervals (thruffs), and act rather like wall ties to help bind the faces together. As the courses of stonework are built up layer by layer the waller makes sure that each joint in the wall, where stones butt up against each other, is capped across the top by the next layer of stone. The weight of the wall helps tie the whole structure together.

Eight tons a day
'It's not really a hard thing to do,' says John. 'The real skill is in good coursing; making sure that each layer of stone is straight and true. When building a wall today we use large "A" frames, which are positioned at each end to indicate the profile of the wall – commonly two feet (60cm) at the bottom tapering to 12 inches (30cm) at the top). String lines are then run down the length of the wall to work to. These help us keep the courses level.'

John continues: 'A typical yard (91cm) of wall 4 feet 6 inches (1.2 metres) high uses about one ton of stone. A good waller would commonly take down, sort and rebuild about four yards (3.3 metres) of wall a day – that's shifting around eight tons of stone in total a day. It's certainly a job to keep you fit. The best bit has to be working outside, and leaving behind you a piece of work that will last for over 100 years, it's a real sense of achievement.'

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