ARCHITECT'S PERSONAL ROCK WALL

Google Earth Site Map shows rock walls and terracing.

Original site plan concept started with blasting a large notch out of the West side of my granite 33+ acre hilltop here in Northern Litchfield County, Connecticut. It’s one of the highest elevations in the State & has South, West and North views from here. The blastwork work was done in the winter and spring of 1994 and left in a huge pile by the excavators. Even after much of the blast rock was repurposed for a half mile long driveway, tens of thousands of tons of rock had remained in the hole you see here. Although I was told by the “local” contractors that this material was “ill-suited” to build walls, I started anyway and laid out the zig-zag design shown here on satellite. The property has almost five linear miles of classic Connecticut rock walls built a hundred or more years ago before there were any trees that contained the dairy cows that grazed from quadrant to quadrant, so that was my inspiration. After a few years of letting the rock pile sit, in 2005 I acquired a 1993 Case 590 Turbo Loader/Excavator & got to work using all this rock to create a 260 linear foot by 5 foot wide retaining wall and level podium for a future house design - this took 10 years to build by myself. I estimate about 10,000 cubic yards of granite blast rock in hundreds of thousands of pieces each handled individually and set into place using a time honored technique I call “flat side out”.. The wall height ranges from 2 to 7 feet above grade and is countersunk deep into the ground with boulders the size of golf carts. Two years ago, I started a second “upper podium” eleven feet above the first one to level out what I call the “front yard” - this part is almost complete. I have a smaller curved section I started last summer between the upper & lower podiums for retaining some sort of landscaping feature planting bed. This is all for completion next spring as I contemplate my next move - house, Las Vegas style swimming pool, frog pond ( a second one) or Croquet court…from a real estate tax point of view - it’s Croquet or frog pond all the way! While all this was going on I built a small “guesthouse” and nice big garage where I’ve watched the progress all these years since. Stay tuned.

BK 2020

Looking down into the pit from top

Retaining Wall

A really cool pool???? Or a really cool house??? Plenty of potential