Drystone Wallers

The remit for this project was to turn a very steep (approx 10m high) hillside garden into low maintenance gravel filled terraces  including a veg patch and large open area containing a formal feature pond, with access using steps and paths to reach each area.

One side of the garden was completely terraced at 1m high intervals with small square top stones hand cut on site to contain decorative gravel and give a neat formal finish to the walls. The owner also had us rebuild 3 terraces that a previous builder had done, which he now realised had been built to an extremely poor standard.

All of the walling was built using stone from Johnsons Wellfields Quarries, the stone flags are Indian Raj Green flags and the aggregate used is 10mm limestone. (please click images)

We built thirty steps from top to bottom to give access to every terrace and the vegetable patch at the bottom. This included carefully ‘bridging’ large tree roots within the steps so as not to harm or affect the tree’s growth and also so that the tree does not damage the stonework in the future.

A very technically challenging pond, incorporating a smaller pond filled from water pumped out of the rear parapet wall, which then travels under an arch to fall over a copper cascade creating a sheet of water and also airating the larger pond.  This was once a steep hill and all this area has been created by building a large retaining wall then leveling the ground behind it.

As you can see bringing in the vast quantities of materials required was difficult but not beyond us! Here you can see the large retaining wall holding up the pond area, it is 3 metres high in places and upto 1.5 metres thick. this wall has three layers of through stones for strength and which protrude creating a nice feature. the topstones are also unique on this wall, they are rounded on the back and square at the front.

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