Dry Stone Walls

With dry masonry, bricks/stones are stacked using no mortar to bind them, the structural bond being ensured by their shape and weight and a unique construction method of interlocking the stones. These are usually natural stones but can also be made of worked concrete blocks. With free-standing walls today, the stones are often bonded together in places with a composite mortar to increase stability. As with rubble masonry, the natural stones may already be strongly weathered (eroded), cracked, or split, which makes the mounting of anchor screws precarious at best! Always check the load-bearing capacity and durability of your stones before installing a climbing aid system!

All five of our construction styles - together with their standard fittings - can be used with dry stone. However, our heavy and massive kits should be kept for considerably large stones only, as the material thickness of the wall is key for successfully installing anchors or rawlplugs effectively. Weaker cable systems, such as our 'lightweight design', can be paired with smaller stones. If you feel uncertain about the structural integrity of the facade, you can increase stability by squeezing mortar into the stone joints to create a larger, more stable stone block; this is called cementing and means that you can instal expansion anchors, rail-lugs, etc... without the use of composite mortar. We recommend Hammer drills, universal drills, and percussion drills.

In the case of extreme uneveness in the stone composition, those points which project outwards should be used for the wall mounts in order to achieve a sufficient amount of wall distance. It may be necessary to use more anchors than planned to compensate for the fact that you may not even be able to mount in some places on the wall.