How to Design a Gravity Stone Wall

Gravity stone walls often encircle flower beds or bushes.

Testaments to the ingenuity of the human mind, properly designed gravity stone walls lend beauty and artistry to just about any landscaping style. While modern stone walls often use mortar or cement to hold the individual stones together, traditional stone walls, commonly called gravity or dry stone walls, rely upon gravity to keep the stones in place. Improperly designed walls will weaken and collapse soon after installation. Spend adequate time and care designing your gravity stone wall and it can last for decades.

Things You'll Need

• Garden hose
• Graph paper
• Pencil/pen
• Metal rebar posts
• Hammer
• Mason's string
• Shovel
• Gravel/sand

Instructions

1. Examine other stone walls to help get your creative juices flowing. Drive around your neighborhood or county in search of stone walls, especially if you live in an area of the U.S. such as New England that has a rich history of gravity stone walls.

2. Check out some landscaping or stonework books from your library or browse the Internet looking for designs or patterns that catch your eye. Decide whether you want your stone wall to primarily be ornamental or functional.

3. Mark out a temporary perimeter for your gravity stone wall to help visualize the dimensions and finalize the exact shape and size. Spread a garden hose out across the ground where you want the front or face of your stone wall to be. Adjust the shape of the stone wall by simply shifting the garden hose forward or backward across the ground.

4. Draw a sketch of your gravity stone wall. Use graph paper to make the sketch most accurate by drawing everything to scale. As a rule, your stone wall should be at least half as wide as it is tall to maximize structural integrity; for example, if you want your final stone wall to be 12 inches tall, then it needs to be at least 6 inches wide. Keep the height of your gravity stone wall under 3 feet to minimize potential collapses.

5. Stake out the final dimensions of your gravity stone wall. Hammer metal rebar posts every 3 feet along the face of the stone wall. Hammer an adjacent set of rebar posts along the back side of the stone wall. Stretch a length of mason's string between the posts to mark the wall's entire outside perimeter.

6. Dig a footer trench twice the width of the wall to a depth just below the frost line in your area and line it with several inches of sand or gravel in preparation for laying the stones; depending upon where you live, the frost line could be as little as 6 inches or as much as 4 feet from the soil's surface.

Tips & Warnings

• Check with your local city office regarding any required permits before you begin building your stone wall.

• When you build your wall, stick with limestone or sandstone, both long, flat stone species that stack together well when constructing dry stone walls, says Charles McRaven, author of "Building Stone Walls." Angle the stones toward the center of the wall to maximize the force of gravity in holding the wall together.

References

• "Building Stone Walls"; Charles McRaven; 1998
• "The Complete Outdoor Builder"; Creative Publishing International; 2009
• This Old House: Engineering a Retaining Wall