BUILDING WALLS

No one might know their age, or who built these dykes, but they are there, crisscrossing the island for kilometres. These dry stone walls on Unst, Shetland, are simply accepted as being there, as forming a part of the natural patterning of the landscape. It is not until one pauses and considers the process and effort involved in constructing these walls that one becomes astonished. This is not just a matter of stacking stones to a preferred height along an alignment.

The rocks must have been gathered up in the clearing of the fields, and thrown into piles ready to be placed. The technique might sound simple and straightforward, merely a matter of persistent work and time, but constructing these walls involved a true skill and thoughtful care.

Out of a pile of randomly gathered stones, the dry stone waller has made perfectly straight walls with a perfectly true face on each side, even taking the time to ‘finish off’ the work with a stone capping, all neatly arranged to become a true coping, as precise as any on a cathedral, but all made just from the collected rocks, and with the ‘extra’ effort to cap the wall off; to make a ‘proper job’ of it.

The more one considers the wall, the more one admires the skill, care, and effort that went into its making. It is good work, as E.F. Schumacher spoke of it in the book with this title - HarperCollins, 1979. The wall still stands as assuredly unyielding as the day it was built, after years of buffeting by snow, storms, and rain.

This is the work of a true craftsman. One thinks of the lines in Robert Frost's poem,

Mending Wall:

Before I built a wall I’d ask to know

What I was walling in or walling out,

And to whom I was like to give offense.

One can see the dyker thinking and feeling as the work is done, such is its wondrous beauty that even includes the idea of the dentil corbelling of the stones with a remarkably accurate, subtle delicacy, all created from rubble, with stones that have been thoughtfully selected and carefully placed, the rule being that a rock picked up is never put down except into its place in the wall: some wall - consider the stones.