Dry Stone Walling
Local stone laid without mortar by a waller, double-skinned with hearting and through-stones. Self-draining, habitat-rich, and fully demountable.
Carbon and evidence
How This Is Made
An Environmental Product Declaration is issued by a manufacturer against a declared unit. This record has neither, so it states sourced facts about process and provenance instead of a carbon figure.
Regional walling styles across the UK uplands; Dry Stone Walling Association craftsman certification
Process
Feedstock
Mineral
Site-won field stone or local quarry stone; imported stone negates most of the benefit
Process heat
No heat
Binder
No binder
Fabrication
Site-formed
Sourcing: site-won to local
Who Builds It
Specialist trade
Established in the UK
Labour-intensive and priced by the square metre of face; the stone is often the cheaper half
End Of Life
Demountable
Taken down and rebuilt with the same stone; no waste stream
Maintenance: Rebuilt in sections as it bulges or slips; no like-for-like replacement needed
Specification Risk
What a specifier has to resolve before this can be built.
- Certification
- No product certification. DSWA craftsman certification covers the waller, not the wall.
- Fire
- Non-combustible
- Warranty
- Workmanship only
- Insurance
- Not normally an issue for boundary walls; retaining applications need engineering input
- Supply
- Waller availability is regional; stone supply is the longer lead item if not site-won
Read This Honestly
- •Near-zero embodied impact applies only to site-won or local stone. Haulage dominates otherwise.
- •Retaining applications are an engineered use and fall outside the traditional boundary-wall precedent.
Design & Specification Notes
Local stone laid without mortar by a waller, double-skinned with hearting and through-stones.
Material Note
No binder at all, so the whole impact sits in winning and moving the stone. Site-won or locally quarried stone gives a near-inert wall; the same wall built from imported stone is dominated by haulage.
Typical Uses
- •Planting systems
- •Biodiversity zones
- •Outdoor amenity
Key Performance
Supports biodiversity and surface water management.
Specification Actions
- •Establish whether stone is site-won, local, or imported — transport is the dominant impact by a wide margin.
- •Confirm the waller has built in the local style; coursing and through-stone spacing are regional.
- •Record it as demountable in the end-of-life strategy — the stone is reusable indefinitely.
Indicative Health & Indoor Air
Inert stone, no binder, no coatings.
Category baseline
No baseline established
No published figure for this category meets the declared unit, lifecycle modules and standard needed to sit alongside product declarations.
Searched and rejected. The Brick Development Association EPD page carries no numerical figures. Secondary sources quote three different per-m² industry averages (26, 27.3 and 32.1 kgCO2e/m²) and two per-tonne ranges (211–242 and 250–350 kgCO2e/tonne) without a consistent scope. The three products here declare per kg, so a per-m² figure is the wrong dimension regardless. Revisit with the BDA Generic Guide, which the association cites as holding the underlying data.
Products in this category
6 products from 4 manufacturers · 294 in this category. Ordered by the evidence each record holds, never by commercial standing.
Specification
- Finish
- Coursed dry stone, no mortar
- Service life
- 100 years