Dry stone on walk to Almondbank - Drystone appreciation and the long history of dry stone building in Scotland.

Being a dry stone waller in Perthshire means I am surrounded by great examples of the craft, sometimes dating back hundreds of years. Part of walling is appreciating the history of the craft and it’s so interesting to realise how long it has been used and how ingrained in the common consciousness it is. In Scotland we have a tradition of cairn building. The word cairn comes from the Scottish Gaelic: Càrn and Cairns are piles of stones, stacked in the drystone way. In Scotland these stacked stones are used to represent many things. Traditionally if one were to climb a hill you would take a stone from the bottom and place it at the top to mark the high point. These cairns growing ever bigger as more people make that journey. Often used to mark the right way to go on trails etc too. It’s a Gaelic tradition and there is an old Scottish Gaelic blessing that goes ‘Cuiridh mi clach air do chàrn’ or ‘I'll put a stone on your stone’. In Highland folklore it is said that before clans fought, each man would place a stone in a pile. Those who survived returned and took their stone from the pile. The stones that remained were built into a cairn to honour the dead.

On a walk from Methven to Almondbank in Perthshire I was pleasantly surprised to find that, on a route I have walked many times before, many cairns had appeared. Even on a sunny day this part of the walk is shaded by thick tree cover and is intensely quiet (except for the far off sound of a river) and the longer I looked the more cairns began to appear from the dark landscape. Some stacked against trees, some stacked in among ferns. Some tiny, some large and all deliberately placed in this rough and fairly remote environment. I wondered what they meant to the people that built them.

Something else I love about cairns is that once a person builds one, many others appear. There are many places in Scotland, often high points or areas of particular natural beauty, where you will find hundreds of cairns in one place, each built deliberately by a person or group, marking that moment and space for as long as the stones stand.