"My Wall in Snow," taken in Martha's Vineyard by Ms. Cook.
Article: The New York Times - Dazzling Ingenuity of the Dry Stone Wall
Author: Alice Rawsthorn
Published: October 9, 2011
LONDON — It began with the runaway cows. When the photographer Mariana Cook and her family returned to their home on Martha’s Vineyard one afternoon, they found more than 50 cows grazing on their lawn. Part of the dry stone wall that divided their property from a neighboring field had collapsed, and the cows had forced their way through.
The wall was built in the traditional way, from interlocking stones, which were carefully selected in terms of shape, texture and weight to stay securely in place within a self-supporting structure. It had been there for as long as Ms. Cook could remember, but it was only when she examined it with her neighbor, the cows’ owner, that she realized how intriguing it was, structurally and aesthetically. She started to take pictures of the wall in different seasons and embarked on an eight-year project to photograph other dry stone walls all over the world.
Ms. Cook’s photographs have been published in a book , “Stone Walls: Personal Boundaries,” together with essays by farmers, historians and an archaeologist on the history of dry stone walls in different countries. As well as revealing the beauty and longevity of the walls, the book tells a remarkable design story.
Robust, enduring and environmentally sensitive, a dry stone wall is a dazzling example of design ingenuity and of the possibility of making something useful from found objects that are usually ignored or discarded. A well-built wall can last for over a century, and requires less maintenance than a hedge or fence. It is made solely from found materials and removes no nutrients from the surrounding soil, while providing shelter for rabbits, mice and other wildlife. Insects thrive among the stones, as do lichen and mosses. A dry stone wall is also a model of the old school Modernist design concept that “form follows function.” Its beauty is usually coincidental, because every design decision taken during construction is determined by efficiency.
Dry stone walls have been built for thousands of years, ever since the start of the Neolithic Age in 7,000 B.C., when the first farming communities emerged in Greece. It was then that people began to supplement the food they found from hunting and foraging in the wild by cultivating their own plants and animals. They needed to find a means of sealing off their land to identify it as their own, and to prevent their livestock and poultry from straying, and predators from stealing their crops. Building a physical barrier was an obvious solution, and in many places, the only readily available construction 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 have emerged. The dry stone wall is an exception. Even today it is designed and made in almost exactly the same way as it was some 9,000 years ago. Like the walls themselves, the underlying design principles have survived because they still work.
The most ancient walls photographed by Ms. Cook belong to the Hagar Qim Temple, which was built in Malta between 3,600 and 3,200 B.C., long before Stonehenge, and is now one of the world’s oldest religious sites. Among the others are the 15th-century Inca walls in Peru, whose immense stones were melded together so meticulously, that 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 Mediterranean islands like Malta and Sicily. All of them were constructed for similar reasons, generally because the farmers needed to enclose their land and lacked other materials to do so, or wanted to remove unwanted stones to cultivate 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 sunshine in the Mediterranean Basin; icy winds and rain on the hills of northern England and the islands off the Scottish and Irish coasts.
Would-be dry stone wall builders can now learn the craft on courses, but most of the older walls were built by instinct, sometimes with the help of advice passed on by word of mouth. Yet many of those walls demonstrate considerable skill and flair. The limestone walls on the Irish island of Inis Meain are unusually expressive with different shapes and sizes of stones positioned to create exquisite patterns. Useful features have been added to the walls there and elsewhere, such as sheep creep passageways, big enough for a sheep to squeeze through, but not cows, and step stiles that people can use to climb over.
“Working walls” also evoke their location. They tend to be built from stones found nearby, and often reflect the history of the place. Sometimes that history can be ugly. The dry stone walls in Kentucky are often called “slave walls,” because many of them were built by African-American slaves working on the farms. My own childhood memories of the picturesque dry stone walls around a remote village in the Yorkshire Dales were ruined when I discovered that they too were partly constructed by slaves. A Jamaican sugar baron had brought them to England in the 18th century and sent them out on the hills to build walls for weeks at a time with minimal provisions. Many of the slaves died there.
Thankfully, 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. Constructing a dry stone wall demands considerably more time and skill than other forms of enclosure, but the result can be depended upon to last longer. Each one represents a human investment in the future as a heroic effort to build something, which will define the landscape and protect the land for generations.
In Ollantaytambo, Peru. The walls, which have been built for thousands of years, subscribe to the old school Modernist design concept that "form follows function."
'Terraces,' Ollantaytambo, Peru, March 2, 2005
'Sea Wall,' Blackhead, Burren, Ireland, July 3, 2005
'Sheep Shearing Shed Wall in Mist,' Chilmark, Mass., Nov. 28, 2003
'Sheep Creep,' Biniforani-Teix, Mallorca, June 20, 2009
'Stone Wall Detail,' Shetland Islands, July 3, 2007
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