These Dry Stone Walls

©1986 Dave Goulder
Dave Goulder, of Rosehall by Lairg, Scotland, is one of my favorite singer-songwriters. We share tours together when we can.He's also a master builder and instructor of the art of making mortar- less stonewalls,both in this country and in the U.K.The sheer poetry of his songs has long been an inspiration to me.

These miles of dry stone walls
That hold in ploughed brown fields and kingly halls
The dead of centuries in hills of sand
The stones that bind them
Are proud as what lies behind them
And varied as the counties in this curious land

In Cumberland they built them
On hills that surely must have killed them
Through broom and juniper and stunted ling
Two thousand feet over
With just a tarpaulin cover
They sat through wind and rain and waited for the spring

In Aberdeenshire valleys
The fields were only open quarries
The stone was gathered up and made to stand
But with every ploughing,
You’d think it was stone they were sowing
The walls grew fatter here than any in the land

The Irish built in courses
Of single stones the size of horses
Of glacial boulders without edge or face
And if you could view them
Above, with sun lighting through them
You’d swear the hills were edged with broken granite lace

When Pict and Viking took
Stone pages from some prehistoric book
Of sandy flagstone under Orkney fields
They lingered a-while, and
Left history in the islands
This is what water, wind and time and toil reveal

From Yorkshire’s limestone dales
Through Derbyshire, to the coast of Wales
Or Shetland’s salty rocks to Devon lanes
Just look and discover
Two walls that lean against each other
You’ll never see them in quite the same way again

These Dry Stone Walls is recorded on the CD Return To The Land