Women in the Craft of Drystone - My Initial Thoughts and Experiences

I’m Kristie, a thirty-seven year old, female drystone waller at the beginning of her walling journey. This is just a bit about how I found dry stone walling and my initial thoughts and experiences of the craft.

Caithness is a salt-cured northern edge of Scotland. A bleak and briny land where plants cling to what they can and lonely trees stand like Cailleachan, staves in hand, heads down, leaning into the relentless wind. Even the coast, forever exposed to change by the unpredictable seas, remains uncooperative. Obstinate sedimentary rock is made brittle in the waters of new tides every day. We called that rock 'Flagstone’.

Flagstone walls were often the only feature in the vast Caithnessian flow country. One of my most vivid memories is the sound of flagstone shedding into a slithering clatter beneath my feet as I clambered on these walls as a child. I remember the smells too. On a sunny day it was all dust and dry moss musk but simply lifting a coping stone to find a damp nook could reveal a different olfactory experience: quietly stirring life and metallic earthiness.

As a child I would collect piles of flagstone and arrange small monuments feeling like I was channelling all the mystery and magic of pagan ancestors. Through these little rituals, the stones and walls somehow embedded themselves deeper into my memory than I ever would have thought possible. So, when I left Caithness, I carried them with me.

Until recently I don’t think I had ever seen a dry stone wall being built. That’s the thing about drystone walls, they’re just there and feel like they always have been. As if they were created, not diligent human hands but by the land itself. Within our collective imagination drystone walling remains pretty unexplored and although I was obsessed with the look of walls I had very little idea of how they were built or by whom. This all changed when my ex-husband Luke De Garis of The Drystone Company started learning the craft of dry stone.

When I moved to Perthshire four years ago, Luke moved too so he could still regularly see our daughter. Being so close to Perthshire’s great landscapes and walls really reignited my interest in drystone and through my enthusiastic chatter and the many photographs I took of walls on my travels (as a professional photographer), Luke found his way to the craft.

Watching with interest as Luke has been learning over the last few years, I’ve found myself growing more and more envious of how he spends his time. The love he has for the craft and his growing connection with the outdoors and himself are things I want for myself too. I also want to acquire this almost uncanny ability to create, from piles of stone, beautiful, functional structures that can last hundreds of years.

Making a decision to commit to drystone was more complicated than I thought it would be and the reasons behind that are something I’d like to get into another time. They are perhaps the start of a discussion about why the craft struggles to attract women.

The decision sat with me over many, many months and then during the pandemic, like so many of us, I had some real space to reassess and plan for my future. Turns out I wanted drystone to be a big part of that future. I worked through the usual lies we’re taught to tell ourselves as women, (‘I’m too old’, ‘I’m not strong enough’, ‘Who am I to step into that world’ etc) and for the last few months Luke has been teaching me dry stone.

I want the basics to feel like muscle memory, so that has been my focus. Stones in length ways, no running joints, check for ‘zippers’, place each piece of hearting by hand and with intent…

Building with rough field stone and without bars and lines (which can be set up to ensure straight lines in the wall and the correct ‘batter’), the learning curve has been steep. However, if I can build well within these challenging parameters, I can build well in nearly any situation.

Basics of drystone aren’t hard to grasp, and I’ll do a post about them soon, but the ability to, for example, quickly see the stone that works next to another or develop an eye for visual balance and flow in the wall, these are the things that are developed over many years.

The physical nature of the craft was something I had been very worried about and although I am incredibly tired and sore at the end of a day it hasn’t been an issue. I really want to make it clear to any women considering drystone, you can absolutely handle it physically. Also, strength and stamina build quickly, mental stamina too, after all, you’re solving a 3D puzzle eight hours day.

The solidifying of skills happens through repetition and making mistakes and it has definitely been frustrating at points. Sometimes it truly feels as if only the universe herself has the power to gift you the right stone.

I read a poem by Robert Frost called ‘Mending Wall’ and since I’ve been getting to grips with building and this Scottish field stone, these three lines are often repeated in my head.

‘And some are loaves and some so nearly balls

We have to use a spell to make them balance:

‘Stay where you are until our backs are turned!’

If any of you happen to have that spell to hand, please get in touch.