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Stone Structures - Thea Alvin - and my trip to Ireland

This morning Re-nest put up an article about the work of Thea Alvin.

I was immediately captured by her work.  Mostly because I come from a long line of Italian stone masons and I feel like stone is in my blood.  But its something I wish I knew more about as well.  Her stone arches are a fantastic display of what a mason can do with dry stone structures.  Here is an example of her stone arches.

After pouring through her website and countless videos I kept seeing something in her work that seemed familiar and I could not place it.  Sure I like dry stone work more then the average person but what was I seeing?

And then I saw one of her photos of a capstone roof and here and then it hit me.  Her work reminds me of my trip to Ireland. I was on the Dingle Peninsula and we discovered The Gallarus Oratory.  The Gallarus Oratory is  a dry-stone church dated around 800. Its built in the shape of an overturned boat and it is dry inside after 1211 years.  I quickly ran through my photo folders and pulled a few examples.

Here is the Oratory from the front door.  I needed to be close enough to 

get the joints clearly but that made me too close to get the whole structure.

This is the top of the doorway from inside.

 This last one is inside looking up at the roof above the doorway.