I love stone walls. It is a New Englander thing.
Here is an old, simple wall, with plenty of lichen.
Some times a farmer just pulled the rocks from the field and stacked them without mortar.
Other walls are smooth, refined and heavily mortared. (Not my favorites.)
It is pretty common to see precise stone columns but less attention to the walls.
Some newer stone walls are the neat products of careful masons, especially in a town with many Italian immigrants who learned their craft in the old country.
Some stone walls are almost artistic.
Some have little stones fit into the cracks formed by bigger stones.
Others once defined fields that have returned to nature.
And some stone walls have sharp stones on the top to discourage the local boys from sitting on them while romancing the maids and the daughters.
4 comments:
I need to reread the Paul Auster novel, The Music of Chance.
What a great series of photos documenting a wide variety of stone walls. They are also common in Ireland.
I miss the stone walls found all over New England. I owned a house in North Stonington on 6 acres of land, and actually found a stone wall marking my property line running down the middle of a creek. There never was any shortage of stones in Connecticut to build these walls.
Unmortared old stone walls are not unusual in TX....Germans built a lot of them, though my grandmother said "an Englishman" built the ones on her ranch.....how she knew that is unknown, and she also made things up, too...My father still used a portion as a corral, as they were tall and in good shape . Likely built around the 1870's.
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