Thread by @James_Taite

A thread on building with stone.

Particularly, the way stones are arranged in the wall, or ‘bond’.

Specifically, that bond called sneck, or Scotch.

A stone wall is a stone wall, right? Look at these two: rubble (L) and sneck bond (R). Just stone walls.

Stone is rock given purpose, picked up with an intention in mind. Rubble is closest to that primal purposeless state. Unsquared and relatively unworked it expresses an economy of effort. The worst knobs are knocked off. The stone is turned over to determine how it will sit…

…and where the face is and without further fuss, laid. Deficiencies are made good with small pinnings and large gobs of mortar.

Much of the character of rubble comes from the nature of the stone in the ground. Look at undisturbed bedrock; it predicts the work of local masons.

And sneck bond is the regularisation of rubble, the application of a set of rules. Just as rubble relates to the natural strata and vents of bedrock, prised up and given purpose, so sneck bond is rubble systematised.

Hereabouts (south Ontario) sneck is often called Scotch bond. Loads of Scottish masons. I’ve also seen it referred to as broken range or speckled. Different people, different names.
‘Walling composed of squared, uncoursed stone of varying size’ might be the simplest definition.

Sneck bond is made up of 3 sorts of stone, distinguished by the role they play: jumpers, runners, and snecks.

A jumper is a tall stone; one that rises through the height of 2 smaller stones (a runner and a sneck).

A runner is a long stone, the larger of the 2 making the height of a jumper. Runners are sometimes coursed (2 or more stones of equal height laid consecutively), or run, for a short distance.
And a sneck is a small stone; the smallest of the stones making the height of a jumper.

From here, it gets a bit muddy: a runner can also be a jumper or a sneck, depending on what is adjacent; a sneck or jumper can be longer than the next-door runner; and a runner can be as large as a neighbouring jumper.

So it’s tricky to define them with precision. But we can understand these 3 stones in relative terms: generally, a jumper is taller, a runner is longer, and a sneck is smaller.

The names differ from place to place. Some masons call jumpers risers; some call runners stretchers…

…Other stones also have other names, like lakers (a runner so long it evokes the proportions of the ships carrying freight on the Great Lakes, determined by the size of the locks on the St. Lawrence Seaway) or fat Tonys (see below), but they all fall into one of those 3 types.

Sneck bond is rubble given rules. Many of these are clearly structural (re lapping stones or breaking joints). As the story goes, at least according to the mason from Arran for whom I work, this bond was devised to make Scottish castles stand against English cannons.

But it also developed as an aesthetic, particularly in the terms of the 19th c picturesque; as the fashion for bare stone eclipsed rendered surfaces, as more complicated textures were favoured over the genteel Georgian order of coursed ashlar, rubble was made artful.

Naturally, given that this is the business of building walls, the most imperative rules the structural; and the least are those that imply a mainly aesthetic purpose. The first are broken at the builder’s peril. The last are bent as one pleases. But even a poorly bonded wall…

…will stand for a time, given a good footing, good mortar, and protection from water. So sternly worded suggestions more than laws. And every mason or crew works with a slightly different set of rules; their work is individuated as a result.

These are the rules I work to:

1/ 2-against-1. Every vertical joint (perp) should have a single stone on one side, and a maximum of 2 stones on the other side. Never 2-against-2, or 3-against-2, and so on. This limits the height of perps to that of the largest stone. Here are some pics of rule-breakers:

By this rule even a large jumper will always be next to a stone at least half its height; this gradation of sizes prevents it from attaining undue visual prominence. An exception can be made against a quoin or jamb, to which one wants to draw the eye.

2/ Lap to the middle third. Vertical joints should fall somewhere in the middle third of the length of a stone to minimize lines of weakness, or zippers, up the wall.

3/ Offset perps in non-adjacent courses. This also aims to avoid zippers. And tends to look shit when not done.

4/ No fat Tonys. No stones taller than they are long. Stones should have a horizontal orientation. They should be stable. And they should appear stable; you shouldn’t imagine them falling over. And yes, I’ve been told there was a Tony who had a fondness for these thin stones.

5/ Keep beds short. No horizontal joint should extend farther than you can reach with your arms spread. If, however, your arms are as short as mine feel free to break the letter of this law (though not the spirit), since ~four feet is an excessively short run.

6/ No (boom)boxes

7/ No jumpers on jumpers. Or, more precisely, no jumpers of similar size and proportion touching; those that look dissimilar can sit side by side. Applied too rigorously this rule can lead to another pattern: that of jumpers suspended like raisins in a pudding of smaller stones…

…Structurally fine, but visually wonky.

Unimaginatively applied, rules tend to result in repetitive, formulaic solutions. Sneck bond, however, works best when it avoids the making of patterns—in the best walls no individual stone draws the eye.

Ideally, the bond becomes a background, a uniform texture against which details of different colour or tooling stand out. It’s a fun game, building sneck bond. A fine balance of order-giving without pattern-making. Pushing the rules and sidestepping traps.

And to that end, after having taken the trouble to lay all this out at tedious length, I want to emphasize that sometimes you throw the fucking rulebook off the fucking scaffold.

(all photos mine unless noted)