Vertical or Tapered Walls?

[chukker]

I am very new to stone walling and I'm curious about something. I've been watching stone-walling videos on Youtube and I noticed that there are some stone wallers who build vertical walls. These walls seem to be built by Irishmen. (see John Dunne Stone Mason, and some others). Then there are stone wallers who taper their walls toward the top (Americans and some others).

Then again, perhaps I'm wrong. Perhaps the vertical walls are all tapered but so slightly my untrained eye cannot see.

Any veteran stone wallers who can enlighten me?

Thank you.

[david perry]

Many Irish walls are built without any taper. The walls I built in West Cork never had any taper or batter. But then they are normally wider than walls In UK.

But I've seen a few over there in Eire which are narrower and have taper.

A lot of continental european walls do not have any taper/batter either.

[chukker]

Thank you, David Perry, for the clarification. So, is it not necessary to have any batter? Are the non-battered walls built differently?

[david perry]

Not in my experience - but "throughs" were not always used. in West Cork I/we used either very large slabs or very large rocks and therefore the walls were generally wider and of course with large slabs there was lots of overlapping from each side.

[chukker]

Thank you again for helping me out, David.

How do you, in West Cork, tend to move around your larger stones? Are you a purist and use stone sleds and other means, or do you throw in a backhoe/loader?

[david perry]

I never met a purist over there.! Any method that worked. Machinery if you had it available - otherwise I've used everything from fencing posts as rollers, to long lengths of timber to get stone up in the wall if I couldn't manage to lift it.