Home Depot sells a mortor bag that you can fill and put in between the cracks of rocks or brick. I bought one, but haven't tried it yet. So, if you can add piping to a cake, this should be a snap.

Yeah, you buy the equipment, the bag and stuff and several years later you know how to use it. Home Depot sells the tools but not the expertise. Okay, "this should be a snap". What an insult to craftsmen everywhere.

If this is the kind of wall I'm thinking of, I think Mollymaples is focussing too much on how the joints look and not enough on how the stones are fitted. That is where the challenge is - to make the joints very even so that they become a feature - not to mention sourcing the right kind of stone. Are you planning on trying this? If so, look in some stone masonry books so you can tell a stoneyard or stone mason exactly what it is that you want.

This weekend I took a closer look and I'm not doing a good job with my description. I wouldn't dream of trying this myself. It looks like a lost art, unfortunately.

I'll try to take some photos.

I found this site and it gives a very nice overview of the type of stonework to which I was referring.

http://www.degruchymasonry.com/recipes.html#details

The stone wall that I saw had some type of pale red color in the joint, too. Has this look just fallen out of favor?

Not quite sure which item on that richly informative web page you're referring to; I was thinking of rock work like that in some of the top panels, not the brick. I'm guessing that a lot of this expertise is dying out.

Knock on the door and speak to the owners. 9 times out of 10 the people will be willing to chat about something like this, quite happily!

What is really sad is the repairs being done on this type of work. Where the old mortar has crumbled, it's been patched in with some type of cement that ruins the look of the original.

Surely there is some information out there to help preserve or at least attempt to duplicate the original look.