Activity Instructor: Alastair McGowan
Activity Duration: One full day
Max Participants: 4
Participant Requirements: Suitable outdoor clothing for cold and wet weather, safety boots, and a pair of work gloves.
Activity Tasks
- Perceiving the topology, groundwater, stability of the path of an intended wall
- Preparing ground to remove vegetation, topsoil, manage tree roots, and identify a foundation soil
- Perceiving stones of use in walling, stone qualities, categorising functions
- Sourcing stone as local as possible to the new wall
- Manual handling awareness and using the work as beneficial physical exercise
- The art of placing stones to create a stable structure (main activity)
- Using eyes and hands to see an emerging structure and feel its qualities
- Techniques for overcoming environmental factors, eg slope and groundwater
- Breaking down the work into a majority of manageable repetitive tasks interspersed with more effortful problem-solving tasks
- Keeping tidy and ordered progress
- Holding a vision of the overall objective
- Finishing and confirming the work
Objectives
A selection of sites for building walls needs to be clear before the day so that appropriate planning of these walls can be incorporated into the woodland, and so that considerations of the various practicalities – site constraints, distance to centre, and risk assessments can be confirmed in good time
Tools & Materials Used
- Stone hammers
- Shovel, pick, bar
- Line
- Line stakes
Outcomes
- Planning work with realistic objectives and breaking down tasks to keep things simple both mentally and physically
- Enjoying the environment and its connection to the tasks, identifying tasks that bring associations of stress in order to cope and progress
- The working woodland, history and linkages between the functional human activities and nature
