Dry stone wall

[Juju]

The good news is that a neighbour called to see us yesterday and told us that we're the owners of a dry stone wall on the left hand side and end of our garden - which we'd never seen cos it's hidden by a fence and we're on higher ground than next door - and also that we have another 3 feet of garden behind our shed!

The bad news is that sections of the wall have either fallen down or look a bit dodgy so we need to get it repaired. I've done a search on the forum and got some good info on dry stone walls and also from the neighbour got the name of someone to approach about doing the work.

The question is more of a design/aesthetics one - is there a way of incorporating the lovely wall into our garden - but retaining privacy? It's essentially a retaining wall for our garden so our garden is level with the top of the wall and the previous owners of our house put the fence up on our side of the wall. Would it be expensive/technically difficult to fit fencing or trellis into the wall? Other options are of course just leaving the fence (in which case we don't get the visual benefits of the wall) or removing most of the fence and use the existing and new shrubs to create privacy but without blocking too much of the view of the wall (but that might mean stopping the kids playing football with no fence to keep the ball in our garden!)

Any ideas welcome!

 

[skier-hughes]

I assume your garden is not quite level with the wall, or if it is you won't have any visual apsect of the wall, so may as well keep the fence.

Or, depending on garden layout, you may wish to start the fence further up the garden, see some of the wall, but have the fence where kids can play and you don't venture so much.... or maybe the garden is only small, consider netting to keep the ball in your side?????

 

[chuckey]

My cottage is in the Yorkshiire dales "the home of drystone walling". I too have problems with all my walls. They stem from the fact that they sit on insubstantial foundations in the top soil, and they are constructed by having outer skins with rubble infill. As the wall settles the infill acts as a wedge and forces the skins apart. In a well constructed wall the stones should "flat" and laid horizontally. What actually seems to be the case is that a great number of the stones (20%?) are really large pebbles so they slip quite easily. Also I believe that there should be rows of "through" stone every 2 feet in height, often there is only a top layer of throughs.
As for fixing something to them the only way is to push a piece of "wire" through a convenient crack and tie posts to the wall with some fencing wire and fix your trellis to them.
Frank