Friday, December 19, 2014

A reviving stone wall in Elora, Ontario


"when anything has to be renewed....the only question asked is how little it can be done for, so as to tide us over our responsibility and shift its mending on to the next generation." 
William Morris

Elora Gorge: deep channels carved out of ancient limestone




I've been going to Elora for over fifty years now, drawn there by the beauty of its setting above a deep river gorge and its collection of well-maintained stone buildings from the nineteenth century. Elora is a place with period ambience that's still largely unspoiled. My first trip to this small Ontario village was actually to swim in an abandoned quarry alongside the Grand River.
As I recall, it was an unusually hot June and we had decided to play hooky from studying for final exams to find a swimming hole in the untypical heat. There was talk of an abandoned stone quarry near Elora that had high walls and deep, clear water, which turned out to be a thrilling place for jumping and diving (it wasn't fenced-off then). To get there from Waterloo, you drove through the village of Elora, a revelation that immediately caught my imagination because it seemed authentically from another time. It's a mix of mostly older stone and brick buildings in good repair that haven't been infilled with many clashing modern intrusions. And the physical surroundings are dead lovely too.


Elora developed where it is in order to take advantage of its riverside setting, formed by a deep gorge cutting through a massive limestone deposit that's over 400-million years old. The natural run of the river offered a harnessable energy source to drive large-scale machinery.
Water-driven grist mills and sawmills, with later electrical power generation, formed the basis of a thriving economy, and houses, like the one below, came to adorn the river's high banks. Limestone extracted from the gorge and the quarry was artfully worked by Scottish settlers into the solid houses and commercial buildings that still anchor the village character today. The buildings and town form these Scots achieved with local limestone, so different from their much harder native stone, continues to be viable, serving for decades as a tourism-magnet and now en route to becoming a residential enclave. The use made of limestone for building is direct and honest, sometimes fashioned into dimensional blocks for cottages, but as often worked as irregularly shaped pieces in a cement matrix (see below). The effect is solid and pleasing to the eye.


A solid home for a prospering member of the Elora community in the nineteenth century





A structure that may have been an inn has been recycled as a bed and breakfast


The highway to Elora snakes its way through the outskirts of the community, winding past trim stone cottages and the occasional inn while tracing the contours of the land. The stone buildings we passed on my first visit made a lasting impression. I also recall glimpsing a long, curving wall running in front of several stone cottages. Walls aren't a rarity in this part of Ontario, but this one's extent impresses and adds a considerable charm. Subsequently Elora beckoned me back to explore and enjoy, time and again, eventually becoming a place I would choose to visit in order to wander in surroundings redolent of the past. The Elora experience was enriched in the late sixties with the recycling of some of its buildings as studios and workshops for potters, woodworkers and other artists, reinforcing it as an artistic destination. In time I came to know that long stone wall better and found myself checking in on it to see how it was aging and changing. The wall was unremarkable in character yet unique in form, lending definition to the contoured landscape. Its gradually curving extent generates a secure effect by fitting perfectly into its setting.



A long wall that runs with the land's contour


 

Today's sidewalk post-dates the wall, but traces its lead


I don't recall when I started examining this wall more carefully, but at that moment I stopped taking it in as a scenic whole and began trying to discern what still showed of its actual composition. At first glance, its overall effect is similar to that of Elora's many stone buildings, which tend towards limestone's neutral buff-grays. On closer examination, it's apparent this wall has been subject to many interventions over its long life, and to such an extent now that the interventions obscure much of what it originally was. While intact in outline, its original look is now pretty much covered with cement. Realizing this, I worried that continued entombing in response to new breaches would one day obscure even its outline. And yet beneath all that accumulated gunk the wall's real character lay buried. I couldn't help wondering whether it was doomed to stay that way or one day somehow it would be rescued? Increasing care was certainly being taken with repair of many of Elora's stone buildings, but walls often suffer from indifference.



Stone cottages sitting behind secure perimeter walls, the handiwork of Scottish immigrants


I assumed the accretion of all that cement meant that new cracks must be regularly appearing and that homeowners were just doing what they could to keep the wall intact and prevent dilapidation. But this utilitarian approach to repair came at the cost of obscuring the presentation face of the stones, submerging them to the point of disappearance. The next picture gives an idea of the aesthetic results of a great many quick fixes.


This wall is now a monotone gray from all the cement slopped on it over the years


In fact, there's now so much cement slathered over the wall's numerous joints that it's challenging to gain a sense of what it originally looked like. In sections like the one shown above, a not-very-convincing attempt has been made to scribe some lines in the cement overlayer, presumably to imply an order or intentionality of some kind. The photo below shows a closeup so you can judge for yourself the success this has in gaining a plausible effect.



Lines that appear random, various tooling effects, cracks and a new breach near the base.



Capstones disappearing under the burden of mortar used to secure them from cracks


The wall's capstones are a mix of rounded limestone and granite boulders, in contrast to a base made of a mix of chunks of similar materials. There's a kind of rude entablature between the two principal components. I'm sure the wall's original look was rustic and unselfconscious, but I can't picture how the mortar placed between the stones was originally finished. If it mimicked the look of the rubble stone buildings around Elora, it may have been somewhat like the detail shown in the next picture. The manner of filling the voids, and the size of the voids left between the pieces, is what decides the look of the finished surface. But it's impossible to discern what it looked like from staring at what's left showing there today.


A regular pattern developed from irregular materials: loose intentionality in design



This long wall serves both as a boundary marker, visibly defining an edge to the landscape, and as a retaining wall, holding back an earthen bank whose height is exaggerated by the road cut beneath it. One wonders whether the wall was inadequately reinforced for the stress of the weight of earth behind it, whether flimsiness of some sort accounted for the extent of cracking that in turn brought on the cement fix? A visit in fall 2014 unexpectedly shed light on this, as sections of the wall were undergoing serious repair and a cross-section revealing the back of the wall was visible. This repair may relate to drainage issues.


Trees too close to the wall can lift and crack components



Breaches in the wall at the point shown above may be due to tree roots expanding and working their way into the base, perhaps aggravated by mortar's permeability and the expansions and contractions of freeze-thaw cycles. Frost heaving in damp soil is quite capable of mechanically breaking up cement, especially in the thin layers filling voids between irregularly shaped rocks.



Strength at the base, but perhaps subject to toppling stresses



The deconstructed portion shown reveals a prism that's substantially thicker at the base, but not leaning back into the slope. Despite the apparent solidity and strength, the forces of moisture penetration and frost heaving may be causing stresses that crack the upper parts of the wall. The landscape fabric just visible in the picture above suggests this isn't the first intervention at this point. From it we can infer that becoming a steward of this old wall is a potentially involving responsibility that might prompt one to resort to cement as a quick and simple fix for recurring problems.


Stark contrast between covered and newly exposed segments


A revealing discovery awaited me on the far side of this opening, where it became clear that someone was bravely engaged in a more restorative form of repair. Sections on either side of the entry steps to a stone cottage had seen their cement tomb carefully chipped away, exposing the original rock composition of the wall to startling effect (see contrast above). Here the mystery of how the wall once looked dissolved before my eyes. Presumably the mender intends to elaborate a new pattern of mortaring, without obscuring the stone facings, and so regain what was likely the original look. Or perhaps they will be left as excavated, as voids emphasizing the pattern of solids comprising the wall? I can't help but wonder if the original pattern didn't involve flush mortar between the many seams. Yet I found my eye quickly acclimatizing to the emphasis the newly recessed joints lend to the stones. Only the person removing the buildup chip by chip can gain an idea of the original treatment, but by the time I left Elora I'd already become comfortable with the aesthetics of the recessed joints, whether original or not. My next visit there will reveal what choice the current owner has made for the restored wall, but I'm comfortable with it as it is here.


Elements of original personality showing in the cleaned sections:a fresh start for a familiar face


The effect of chiseling away the mortar smeared over stone facings is dramatic indeed to my eyes. A great deal of suppressed personality is suddenly visible in the varying colours and shapes of the individual stones. This restoration would be terribly time-consuming and delicate, so as avoid damaging the face of the stone or dislodging pieces that would grow the scope of the repair. But what potential to regain aesthetic effects!




An exposed section reveals a vibrant personality previously entombed in concrete

Colourful granite boulders and a rough entablature add entirely new dimension to the wall



Contrast the variety of form and colour of the revealed look (above) with a still-encased section of the wall (below) that is grey, uniform and lacking in any distinctive character.


Cement-encased section for comparison - no distinct or even any personality for the stone


So while the cement covered wall more resembles the subdued coloration of Elora's limestone cottages, the original look stands in more vibrant contrast with them. Doubly so, because the cottages model consistent blocks of limestone, while the wall promiscuously mixes chunks of limestone and granite in novel patterns.

These developments leave me with a renewed optimism about the future of this old wall. It takes remarkable commitment to tackle work as painstaking as this, but the ability to regain an historic effect - to  unearth the buried past and allow it to live anew in the present - is to me at least real stewardship and tremendously inspiring.

I can't wait to see how it all turns out.


Off the main drag, another high stone wall persisting in Elora


Like the other wall, this one has had a lot of cement placed over the stone original


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