Traveling across Ireland from east to west, the landscape shifts from wide fields and flat bogs to the smaller, rougher fields of Connemara, of Cork, and Kerry, and Donegal. Where once the boundaries of the fields had been hedgerows, ditches, and dikes, they now become dry stone walls, delicate yet strong, each one unique.
"You'd swear the hills were edged with broken granite lace," says songwriter Dave Golder. And writer Peter Mooney adds that, "For many visitors to Ireland, their abiding memory of the scenery is not the great sweeping seascapes or the ancient mountains shrouded in mist, but these tiny fields emerging from the stony land, surrounded by tens of thousands of miles of stone walls."
Incredibly, these walls are built without mortar and without tools. The stone is not cut, although it may be broken, as whatever stones are available are made to fit as well as possible. The dry stone walls indicate an area where the soil was poor and rocky, and clearing the fields for farming and grazing meant that the stones were readily available and free.
But stone not only runs through Irish fields, but throughout Irish history as well. It has been used and worked since the earliest inhabitants to build their houses, and Neolithic farmers used it to create field boundaries. Good examples of these ancient field systems and their stone walls can be seen at the Neolithic Ceide Fields in County Mayo. It's thought that these may be the oldest Stone Age field systems in the world, at roughly 6,000 years old. And later, during the Potato Famine, An Gorta Mór, The Great Hunger, endless walls of stone dividing nothing were built up and down the wet, harsh mountains by men employed on public works schemes, schemes run by church groups or British landlords to create employment for the poor, starving Irish workers and their families.
They stand their lonely, sad watch to this day. So iconic are the stone walls of Ireland that the Carlow Arts Festival commissioned 20 of the best woodworking artists in the world, including the Lehigh Valley's own Michael Brolly, to come together last summer and create a magical wooden stone wall or story wall that celebrates the history and the lore of the walls, even down to the tiny wooden clay pipe lost inside it and a delicate wooden spiderweb.
The long, graceful wall now stands quietly amidst the bustle of Dublin Airport, welcoming home both visitor and returning wanderer.
For Celtic Cultural Alliance, this is Kate Scuffle. Sláinte.
