Stone related books make great presents for your stone mad friends. Here are a few stone related books I recommend checking out if you are looking for some great christmas presents. Just remember if you’re planning on ordering your books online, get ordering soon to be sure you receive them before Christmas. Most of the links provided have free worldwide shipping. Some of the books need to be ordered from the artist’s direct but I have added these links also. The prices I hav

After months of anticipation, stones, masons and dry-stone enthusiasts from the four corners of Ireland as well as the rest of the world came to a head in the center of Ireland. June 20th 2013 marked the beginning of The Gathering of Stones. Stories were shared, songs were sung (and written) and monuments were built. Just like the cross marked the spot in the posters, the ‘Emigrant Stones’ mark the centre of our dry stone monument. From the beginning. Last summer after Feile

As part of the sculptural outdoor classroom that I am working on at the moment for a school here in Dublin, I was asked to incorporate a tree somewhere into the design to represent the ‘Family Tree’. The ‘Family Tree’ is a song which has come to symbolise the ‘Croí na Scoile’ (The heart of the school). I was also asked to give the students a chance to have some input into the outdoor classroom so that they can make it their own (a very important part of the process for sure)

Last September my wife had to go to a conference to Helsinki, Finland, so I decided to tag along and see what Helsinki is all about. On arriving I quickly noticed that much of the buildings and stone walls in Helsinki are made of a lovely pink granite. If you had a geologist to hand he would tell you the reason for this is because Helsinki sits on an indented Pegmatitic (pink) granite peninsula that makes up part of the Baltic shield. I did not have a geologist to hand, but w

As the winter solstice is coming up, I thought it would be an appropriate time to talk about one of Ireland’s oldest and most impressive stone structures. I am talking of course about Newgrange in County Meath. (County Meath  is well known as Ireland’s Heritage Capital) According to the most reliable Carbon 14 dates available from archaeology, it is believed that Newgrange (or Sí an Bhrú as it is know in Irish) was constructed over 5,000 years ago, around 3200BC. This makes