Wall to Wall

Walking across this landscape, you can't help but think about the hands that built the walls. This is not like the soft English Midlands, where you can plant a few 'quicks', watch them grow for a few years, cut and lay them with a hand cleaver as a gentle, warming, winter activity, and enjoy the benefits of a stock-proof hedge. This is brutal hard-labour: picking stones on open ground, carrying them to the field margin, laying one on another with cold hands in bitter winds, with a keen eye and skill won by years of experience

But it was accomplished. I can't really get my head around the economics of it. When everything had to be done by human or animal muscle, when you grew your own food or you starved, when life was a constant battle against destitution, disease and misfortune, still there was time and surplus labour to construct these beautiful lines of stone, maintain and repair them. The costs seem immense and the benefits obscure. The problem, I think, is my ignorance, not theirs

Now the wheel has turned and the scales have tipped the other way. Fallen walls may not be righted, fallen roofs are acceoted. Any reverence for ancestral hands does not pay the rent. Granting passage to tourists like us is more important than keeping sheep on the right side of the wall. We wondered aloud who was happier, the peoole who built the walls or us, who ponder them as a distraction from the world we have made. We walked on in silence