Slate Wall

This week I'm pitching in on the rebuilding of a slate retaining wall here in Dummerston, Vermont. It's the third time a wall has been put up at this site, the first time by none other than Rudyard Kipling. The Nobel Prize winning author built his Dummerston home in 1892. Subsequent owners of Naulakha expanded on his design for a walled garden, removing his mortared fieldstone wall and replacing it with a larger wall of dry laid slate. That wall now is in need of replacement. Jared, Brittany and I are recycling stone that I suspect was originally quarried from the bank behind the wall, as evidenced by the ledge outcropping we uncovered there.