The dazzling ingenuity of the dry stone wall

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LONDON – It started with the runaway cows. When photographer Mariana Cook and her family returned home to Martha’s Vineyard one afternoon, they found more than 50 cows grazing on their lawn. Part of the drystone wall that separated their property from a nearby field had collapsed and cows forced their way.

The wall was built in the traditional way, from interlocking stones, which have been carefully selected in terms of shape, texture and weight to stay securely in place within a free-standing structure. It had been there as long as Mrs Cook can remember, but it wasn’t until she examined it with her neighbor, the cow owner, that she realized how intriguing it was, structurally and aesthetically. . She started taking photos of the wall in different seasons and embarked on an eight-year project to photograph other dry stone walls around the world.

Ms Cook’s photographs have been published in a book titled ‘Stone Walls: Personal Boundaries’, with essays by farmers, historians and an archaeologist on the history of drystone walls in different countries. In addition to revealing the beauty and longevity of walls, the book tells a remarkable design story.

Tough, durable and environmentally friendly, a dry stone wall is a dazzling example of design ingenuity and the possibility of doing something useful out of found objects that are usually ignored or thrown away. A well-constructed wall can last over a century and requires less maintenance than a hedge or fence. It is made only from found materials and does not remove any nutrients from the surrounding soil, while providing shelter for rabbits, mice, and other wildlife. Insects thrive among stones, as do lichens and mosses. A dry stone wall is also a model of the old-school Modernist design concept of ‘form follows function’. Its beauty is usually fortuitous, as every design decision made during construction is determined by efficiency.

Dry stone walls have been built for thousands of years, since the beginning of the Neolithic in 7000 BC, when the first farming communities emerged in Greece. It was then that people began to supplement the food they found by hunting and foraging in the wild by growing their own plants and animals. They had to find a way to seal their land to identify it as theirs and prevent their livestock and poultry from going astray and predators from stealing their crops. Building a physical barrier was an obvious solution, and in many places the only readily available building materials were stones.

Other Neolithic innovations were driven by the same principle of “necessity is the mother of invention”, but most have been superseded over the centuries as new materials and production techniques emerged. The dry stone wall is an exception. Even today, it is designed and manufactured in almost exactly the same way it was 9,000 years ago. Like the walls themselves, the underlying design principles have survived because they still work.

The oldest walls photographed by Mrs. Cook belong to the Hagar Qim Temple, which was built in Malta between 3600 and 3200 BC. Among the others are the 15th-century Inca walls in Peru, the immense stones of which were mixed so meticulously that the early Spanish colonialists described them as technical marvels in their reports back to Spain.

Most of the walls in the book are “working walls”, originally built by – or for – farmers on rocky terrain in England, Scotland, Ireland, France, the United States and on islands. Mediterranean like Malta and Sicily. All were built for similar reasons, usually because farmers needed to fencing their land and lacked other materials to do so, or wanted to remove unwanted stones for cultivating the soil. It is no coincidence that dry stone walls tend to be built in rocky places where trees are scarce and the climate extreme: scorching sun in the Mediterranean basin; icy winds and rain over the hills of northern England and the islands off the Scottish and Irish coasts.

Future dry stone wall builders can now learn the trade on courses, but most older walls were built on instinct, sometimes with the help of word of mouth advice. Yet many of these walls exhibit considerable skill and flair. The limestone walls on the Irish island of Inis Meain are exceptionally expressive with different shapes and sizes of stones positioned to create exquisite patterns. Useful elements have been added to the walls there and elsewhere, such as passageways for sheep, large enough for a sheep to squeeze through, but not cows, and steps people can use to climb. .

The “working walls” also evoke their location. They tend to be constructed from stones found nearby and often reflect the history of the place. Sometimes this story can be ugly. Kentucky drystone walls are often referred to as “slave walls,” as many of them were built by African-American slaves working on farms. My own childhood memories of the picturesque drystone walls around a remote Yorkshire Dales village were shattered when I discovered that they too were partly built by slaves. A Jamaican sugar baron had brought them to England in the 18th century and sent them to the hills to build walls for weeks with minimal provisions. Many slaves died there.

Fortunately, many “working walls” have a benign history. One of their charms is what they tell us about the hopes and expectations of the people who built them. Building a dry stone wall takes much more time and skill than other forms of fencing, but the result can be relied on to last longer. Each represents a human investment in the future as a heroic effort to build something that will define the landscape and protect the land for generations.


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