Focus on Drystone walling projects in Edinburgh.
Working in Edinburgh
I’ve been fortunate to live and work in the Scottish capital. It’s a fantastic city for both. It’s also a place with a good mix of affluent clients, properties with gardens and good access. Not all the jobs are big though and I’ve built for many clients who were keen gardeners but lacked the landscaping knowhow to to add dry stone landscaping to their gardens. The following some of my jobs.
Redhall, Sitooterie and pizza oven
The client had a large hole in the corner of his sloping garden. He had an idea for a sunken seating area, and got me involved. I can up with a design that made best use of two tall sides for stone retaining walls, one side for a bench and set of stairs down into the space.
Stone was Swinton Rubble from Hutton stone. The pizza oven was from Vitcas and the black limestone paving and aggregates from Border Aggregates.
Easter Steils, feature wall, water and dry stone planters
I built two projects for this client near to Morningside with a few years in between each. The original project was to construct a paved area in a very shaded garden. The large dry stone wall hid the wooden fence to create an attractive stone backdrop. A water feature and pond added flow and movement and sound, and several planters provided space for colourful planting. Finally, various nooks were built into the wall to provide space for candles for nighttime entertaining.
I returned a few years later to change an otherwise sorry bottom area of the garden. Two big and chunky sets of steps were made, together with two dry stone planters. The same stone was used in second job to provide continuity between the two gardens.
Cottage Park, Dry stone retaining walls and bench
This large dry stone garden project in the Ravelston/Blackhall area of Edinburgh. Working with Spruce Gardens, I built a complicated set of retaining walls, steps and benches to provide the hardscaping for this large urban garden.
The digging out unearthed many large monoliths that were too good not to use.
Newhaven dry stone bench
This was a fabulously curvy “question mark” shaped dry stone bench in Edinburgh. This job had a lot of discusion and planning. The design and marking out of an elipse took a lot of effort, but it all worked out.
The combination of building a continuous fall from the cheekend to the steps; the regular change in width of the base as the height fell and ensuring the top width remained a constant 350mm all made for a slow build. Lots of checking, meaasuring, stepping back, checking again.
This was definitely one of my favourite jobs.
The Norton House Hotel dry stone retaining walls
This was one of my first large dry stone walling projects. The reclaimed stone was on site at the hotel during the construction of the new health spa.
Four sets of dry stone retaining walls were built.
Colinton dry stone retaining walls and steps
A nice little take down and rebuild of a long, low retaining wall in Colinton in Edinburgh. Most of the stone was in the garden but the client did an amazing job of scrounging spare stone from neighbours in her street. She came up with at least a tonne of scrap and spare stone that had lain unloved in other gardens in the street for years!