I had a bit of a revelation on my return home from Britain some years ago, after having visited several dry stone wallers in Scotland and England. As the airplane was flying over the green countryside, it occurred to me that the beautiful patterns of walled and hedged fields below took on the same kind of shapes as the stones which fit together so well in the walls I had been looking at during my travels.
It had been a bit of a working holiday that year. I had helped build two walls in Yorkshire and then went and spent some time in Scotland helping repair an old granite fieldstone dry stone wall near an historic castle. What I was seeing reproduced everywhere in the landscape below, was the same quilt-like pattern I had been appreciating in those historic walls of dry stacked stones . It has been said that dry stone walls create unique microcosms but what about the macrocosm of the larger surface of country they embrace? The network of stone shapes within any well-built wall, and the patterns these walls create, as they outline field and pasture throughout the British countryside, hold the same fascination for me . Why is it ,when looking down from above, there is such similar beauty in the patchwork of colours and lines? Is it just the tidiness? Or is there an association of a deeper essence? The dense geological material which is the 'stuff' of the thousands of miles of Britain’s 'borders without mortar', reminds me of the empty crevices throughout the walls themselves. In essence the thin lines are nothing and everything, in the same way a 'joint' can be defined as either a 'joining' or a 'separation'.
The beauty of any terrain that has been gradually outlined by roads and rivers and walls, is the beauty of definition. This grasping of ‘definition’ is essential to our seeing anything at all. More importantly, when any area of interest is carefully outlined, it often produces a pleasing aesthetic quality.
Many paintings by the Group of Seven employ this same wonderful effect. The shapes of trees and branches are often traced with thin ribbons of bright colour showing off the vibrancy of their design, as if to suggest nature is perceived more perfectly when it is seen as being ‘held together’ by outlines. The shapes jump out of the canvas, while at the same time nestle into each other perfectly, in the same way different shapes fit together so well in a box of assorted chocolates. Maybe that’s why I have a tendency to describe these kinds of pleasing arrangements as “yummy” of “fruity”.
A good painter can trace the beauty of any landscape. A waller is just a different kind of landscape artist. Though they work with nothing but rocks and have bigger canvases, they are creating more than just a random patchwork of fields. The large flowing contours they define are really the outlines of expediency; the lines made by clearing and hauling the stones to the closest and often straightest perimeter, before committing to making something ‘continuous’ of them. Instead of the pasture shapes all merging into each other, there is an ordered gathering or ‘crystallization’ of stones along the outside perimeters.
Everything fits, because the walls, by definition, have dual functionality. They act as continuous borders on both sides of each field. The thin ribbons between each field amount to nothing and yet they are everything. They are the decoration and the structure. All the interesting planes and surfaces of the land butt up to one another to become an organized and purposeful network. The fields ‘materialize’ out of necessity, almost like crowded bubbles forming in foam. Perhaps millions of years ago all the multi-faceted stones began forming in the same way.