Stone by Stone: Restoring the Boundary Wall
If you’ve walked past the estate recently, you may have noticed the work underway along the boundary wall.
The house is enclosed by three distinct types of wall. The section we’ve begun restoring is a traditional stone wall with lime mortar, topped with a feature known as cock and hen coping, which consists of alternating flat and upright stones designed to deter deer and livestock from jumping over.
To the west, the boundary becomes a mix of built stone wall with cock and hen sections, before giving way to a dry-stone wall with no top feature. Along Ross Road, the wall changes again, returning to a mortared stone construction with a different style of coping stone.
We believe these walls were established when the estate was first purchased in the 1850s, but some sections are likely older still and contain fragments from earlier farmland used to contain livestock.
You can see similar wall styles throughout estates formerly owned by the Drummond family, especially around their gardens. Many of these were built by French prisoners during the Napoleonic wars. One notable example is the Braco Wall, recently restored by the same team now working at Drumearn.
Struan Donaldson is leading the wall restoration. His team is known for their precision and respect for traditional techniques – they're experts in historic stonework conservation. The walls are made primarily from field stone, usually gathered from the land during ploughing or preparation for planting. Some of the cock and hen slabs were likely quarried specifically to be used in the wall.
Choosing to preserve these walls isn’t the quickest or cheapest path, but it feels like the right one, given they’re part of the estate’s story. Built generations ago, they’re now our responsibility to maintain, so that their character will be preserved for generations still to come.
