Stevenson's harbour wall building technique

[MM5AHO]

The pier at Easdale (Seil side) is a bit like that, but made in slate. Perhaps its more vertical orientation?

 

[johnphilip]

Best Answer Yet

I don't know the harbour nor does Google find me much of the arrangement of walls but if the wall you show is infilling between two natural buttresses then it would be a terrifically strong construction as any settlement would only tighten all the joints, the wall increases in strength with age. I would doubt it is so clever towards the end of a pier unless the end was extremely well butressed by conventionally laid masonry.

 

[JumbleDuck]

Well - once you have managed to tear yourself away and made it over to Gods Country, you must spend time around David Balfour's Bay where you can study the Stevenson methods at first hand.
Would it be Bathurst's book you are reading?

The joggles and trenails system (joggles are square marble blocks fitting recesses in adjacent granite blocks; trenails are the oak pegs) was really pioneered by Smeaton. When Dylan gets to the SW of Scotland, he'll be able to have a look at the Smeaton system in the ruins of Portpatrick breakwater.

 

[JumbleDuck]

too much in it about family disputes and exhausted right hands and not enough about engineering for me

Have you read "The Rock Lighthouses of Great Britain"? Plenty of engineering there, and the larger format 2nd edition has some lovely colour reproductions of original plans.