Stonework in Paleokastritsa, Corfu

Paleokastritsa is steep ground. The land drops fast from the monastery ridge to the coves, and almost everything we build here has to hold a slope before it can do anything else. So our work in this part of the west coast starts with retaining: dry-stone and structural walls set into the hillside, sized to the load and the run-off, not just to the eye.

On a slope this severe, a retaining wall is a structural member, not a border. We build it with a deliberate batter, leaning back into the bank, with hearting packed tight behind the face and through-stones tying front to back so the wall and the hill act as one. Where a terrace has to carry weight or sit below a building, we move to a structural wall with a proper drained backfill; where it is holding garden and olive ground, well-built xerolithia does the work and lets the winter water pass through rather than building up behind it.

On ground like this, dry-stone terraces are stepped down the slope in local fieldstone, each one rebuilt to its own line so the run of the hill reads as a single, settled thing rather than a stack of separate walls. Fieldstone suits this ground, it is what the land already gives, it weathers into the hillside, and dressed too smooth it would look imported here. The skill is in the sorting and the coursing, not in dressing it down.

If you have ground moving, a tired terrace bulging at the face, or a new build that needs the slope held before anything goes up, that is the conversation to start with. Retaining and structural walls are the core of what suits Paleokastritsa; paving, steps and courtyard work follow once the ground is sound. We will read the slope, the drainage and the existing stone before we quote a metre of wall.