Another Rock in the Wall

All you needed to know about rock walls, but were too lazy to read....

Corner

When people wander out for the first visit or so, usually their eye is taken to the rock walls located up the back paddock. There are two stock yards with walls ranging from 1.3 to 1.8 metres high and around a metre thick made out of local basalt. The rocks on our place all consists of 'floaters' which are relatively uniform rounded or flat. Being basalt, they are not light weight. A half-trailer load has the trailer sitting down on the stops with the tyres rubbing on the mudguards.

The rock walls are likley to have been built about the mid to late 1800's when the country was getting cleared and patches were getting ploughed up for crops. There are 1000's of rocks just under the soil, so working with a team of horses and a mulboard plough would have been a day of hard slog and the following day picking up the rocks. Rocks were put to good use and they made built up roads and stock yards out of them.

Gateway

The two walls are built in two different ways. The one closer to the house has been built on very large foundation stones (likely to have been pulled into place with horses) and constructed out of similarly shaped rocks all the way to the top of the wall. About one rock in three has been split in half to provide a wedge and to lean the wall slightly back into the centre-line. The one up on the hill with the tank-stand is also built on large foundation stones but has a 'core' made up of 1000's of cricket-ball sized stones and encased in larger rock wall structure. This latter wall has almost vertical faces. It once had a roof over part of it and a twin milking stand and bail set up. There is still the remains of white-wash on some of the rocks.

These walls have been built by tough, strong people. Much tougher and stronger than me.

The walls are likely to have held sheep pre-fence days, when alot of the country was still forested. There was once quite a few walls about the locality, but with the advent of larger machines, fencing wire and rabbits, many walls were pulled down and used to fill errosion wash-outs and to make roads over boggy land. Many walls harboured rabbits that couldnt be trapped or poisoned.

And the walls at our place? They continue to harbour rabbits and slowly they are falling down. They also provide good homes for snakes and lizards and all sorts of crawlies. (read this as a good thing!). The one closer to the house would make a beaut garden enclosure, keeping the cold winds at bay and providing a terrific solar trap with huge thermal mass.... we would just need to keep the rabbits at bay.