legends · 4 min read ·
Dry Stone
A dry-stone waller finds that stones are laid in the night by someone better than he is, in a loop that closes around him.
There is no mortar in a dry stone wall. People find that hard to believe. They look at a wall that has stood two hundred years on a hillside and ask what holds it. I say: weight. Every stone sits on two others and under two others, and each is turned so its long side runs back into the wall and not along it. A wall is a conversation between stones. You listen for the one that wants to go in a place and you give it that place.
I have been waller to the estate at Highfold for thirty-one years, since I was nineteen. I have rebuilt about nine miles of boundary, one stone at a time, with a hammer and a line and a barrow. I like it. I like that nothing about it can be hurried.
In the spring the farmer, Mr. Prosser, sent me to the high field on the north side to repair a gap. A hundred feet of collapsed wall at the end of a long ridge, the stones in a spill down the slope, grown over with bracken. A wet March had done it.
I started at the lower end, as you do, clearing the footing down to the stable subsoil. I laid the foundation courses, the big square stones, the ones we call throughs. I set them with the face to the field. I worked all day in a thin cold wind with the larks going up.
At evening the wall stood a foot high. I went home.
In the morning I found that a stone had been added. One. At the end of the course, in the gap, a long grey slab, perfectly turned, set on its bed with the grain horizontal as if by someone who knew. I had not left it. It was not one of mine. I looked down the slope for where it had come from, and there was a hollow in the bracken, as though it had been lifted from the ground and carried up.
I took it for a neighbour's kindness. I wasn't offended. I took the stone as my own, and I built on it.
The next morning there were three.
The stones were all fine. That's what I want to say. They were beautiful, fitted, hearted, tight. Better than mine. Whoever was building at night did it with a skill that I have spent three decades trying to find. I stopped in the afternoon to look at the work, and I felt, God help me, envy. The courses were true. The batter, the inward lean, was exact. Even the cope stones, the finishing row along the top, were laid on edge in a perfect upright line like a row of knuckles.
By the end of the week I had a wall. I hadn't built a third of it. I had a wall, two metres high, with a join in it as faint as a scar.
I did what I do when something puzzles me. I sat on the wall with my flask and my sandwich, and I listened. And I heard from the other side, from the pasture beyond, the sound of stone on stone. Click. A pause. Click. The patient, measured sound of a hammer on a hearting stone, and a voice humming. It wasn't a tune I knew. It was in a minor key, and very low.
I got down off the wall and looked over. The field was empty, except for sheep. But along the foot of the wall, on the far side, the earth was turned and trodden into a kind of path, in a long line, and at the end of the line there was another gap I hadn't known was there. A fallen section. The beginnings of a second repair.
I've kept at the wall all summer. I do my bit during the day, and in the night the stones come up the slope to meet me, and the courses grow. The farmer says he's never seen the like. He says the wall's the best he has had. He pays me for the whole.
I've been trying to see who's doing it. I've sat up with a torch. I've watched. I've seen nothing, only the stones, which slide up out of the earth in a long grey procession, very slowly, like the backs of animals, and lie down in their places in the wall.
But I noticed this morning that the new section has changed shape. It isn't the same line as the old wall. It curves. It goes up over the ridge and round the head of the valley, enclosing the field, and the farmhouse beyond, and the road. It goes on round in a great loop.
I walked the new section end to end. It took me two hours. At the end of it I was back where I started, at the first stone, the long grey slab, and I understood that there is no gap left. The wall is closed.
I'm inside it.