Brute Force with Art
This essay appeared in Little Toller’s The Clearing in October 2024
There are some still that hae the skill/tae set stone oot ower weel judg’t stane…
till at their finger-ends/there grows a thing o muckle constancy,/the line of a dry-stane dyke.
From Makars, by Ian McFadyen
John Wilkinson and his son Marc are mending a drystone dyke. It is a grey summer day, and a smatter of rain licks at their faces as they methodically sort the stones, ready to repair a six-foot gap. Lying at three hundred and thirty metres above sea level between Lauderdale and the Gala Water valley, their farm is one of the highest in the Scottish Borders. Looking across from the top field, the rounded summit of the Eildon Mid Hill fifteen miles away floats like a purple island on a lovat green loch.
At five hundred and eighty acres, Inchkeith is a relatively small farm. Its neighbours are now large estate-run enterprises, created by joining several family farms together. Large fields of old pasture roll away to either side. Heather crimsons the hilltops, and Sitka spruce plantations loom in dark patches. The trees are ragged and tall. At more than thirty years old, they are remnants of a late twentieth-century tax incentive scheme that envisaged that they would be felled for timber a decade ago.
The hole in the dyke is one result of Storm Arwen, which scythed through the south of Scotland and Northumberland at up to a hundred miles an hour in January 2022. The storm skittled a swathe of spruces, wrenching out their roots along a hundred-and-fifty-metre stretch of wall and leaving a sprawling, undignified scree.
A major repair of this size called for a team of professional dykers, four men working eight hours a day for three weeks. Day to day, the father and son continue to incorporate the mending of the smaller damaged sections with their other farming duties, as they always have done. John’s wife Lesley says he never goes out without putting a stone back. He replies that it’s important to get to any holes before they become too big. If you just put a hurdle or gate across a gap, as several of his neighbours have done, there comes a point of no return when you have to wire-fence the whole length. And then you may as well let the wall go.
Today the Wilkinsons are working on a section that has collapsed to half-height. Eighteen months after Arwen, the trees behind the wall have been cleared, leaving resinous stumps like buttons on an accordion, the brash lying in loose piles. The ground, which has not seen daylight for decades since the dark branches closed in, is scratched and bare.
Marc steps through the gap, ducking under two strands of weathered wire, plain and barbed, which run between old slender wooden posts to prevent cattle from rubbing. As most of the stones have fallen to his side, his first task is to select some and pass them back to John so they can begin with a roughly equal amount. They sort the stones into differing sizes: larger stones for the outer sides and smaller stones for the ‘hearting’ that packs the middle of the wall, so the rebuilding can proceed efficiently.
The stone is whinstone, the local term to describe hard dolerite. Its warm, patient grey takes on a dramatically deeper shade when wet, as the upper surfaces are today. The stones have a chalky sheen of delicate pale green lichen and silver-dry blooms of moss.
The wall has been splayed down to the level where the long stones known locally as throughbands run across its breadth. Some of these large stones can weigh up to forty-five kilogrammes. Manoeuvring them back into place is a two-man job – and a young man’s game, according to John. A fit but slight and wiry man in his early sixties, he knows he is lucky to have Marc, half his age, working the farm alongside him, not least for the manual job dyking will always be.
Marc is a fell runner like his father before him. He trains at night when the work is done and his children are asleep, using a powerful headtorch and the sheltered side of the dykes as a guide. Sometimes he sees bats fly out, or notices pairs of green stoat eyes shining out of the gaps in the stones.
They are not sure how old these dykes are. As with drystone walls everywhere, their ability to be endlessly rebuilt makes them hard to date. The men who built Britain’s drystone walls, using an ancient skill passed down from the earliest days of farming in the Bronze Age, are unknown and largely forgotten. An exception is Robert Cairns, who in 1908 was repairing dykes at Gilston, the farm next to the Wilkinson’s.
Cairns’s Notes on Dyking, published by his son ‘without embellishment’, tell of a hard, itinerant life. During their working week – six ten hour-days for which they would earn around two pounds – the men stayed with shepherds or ploughmen, paying for board and lodging. For three shillings a week, they received some food and some chaff-filled bedding known as a ‘tyke’ by the fire – if they were lucky. Sometimes they were just shown to where the sheepdogs slept. In the mornings they would be given some brose (thin porridge) before packing their pipes with tobacco and setting off, sometimes walking four miles over the hills to begin their work. The pair were expected to ‘redd oot’ (take down a wall ready for rebuilding) at a rate of twenty yards a day. Cairns writes of how a team of seven men on the Gilston contract – including Old Tom, aged eighty – rebuilt fifty yards of wall a day. There was – and still is – a ton of stone in every yard. The laird’s records showed the walls had been repaired seventy years previously ‘and might have been at least a hundred years old then.’
Protective equipment involved an apron and cotton strips wound round their fingers. Their boots wore out quickly against the stones, meaning they ‘always had wet feet on wet grass’. Sometimes there were disputes about pay. Penny-pinching farmers who paid dykers short could have their walls ‘ramfeezled’ – destabilised at the base with a crowbar to ensure they would last only a few years before ‘bulging in the ribs and turning into the shape of a tattie [potato] pit’.
Cairns says that the effort of lifting a heavy cope stone made him feel as though blue sparks were shooting out of his eyes, but he also notes the compensations of being a dyker –being close to nature. Working away quietly, the voles and mice would play about him, the curlews, peewits and crows ‘take him for granted’, and the sheep and cattle came along to stare and pass the time of day.
His father, known as a rough man with terrible moods, shows Robert his tender side by ‘digging out a wee mouse in his nest in winter months, or a hedgehog in his sleep, and building them a wee recess in the new dyke with a loose door stone so they could get away easily when the time came for them to wake up.’ He once saw his father carry a young hare halfway across a field to remove it from the building works, and create a new scrape to keep it safe until its parent could find it.
As for the work, the two experienced dykers would adopt a rhythmic routine, making the stones ‘clink’ into place with the least effort. But it was always tough work. Robert Cairns calls dyking ‘brute force combined with art’.
Today, John and Marc have their section mended in just over an hour. Marc climbs back across the wall, stepping carefully over the top wires before jumping down and driving off in the lightweight four-wheel drive Gator to check on fencing contractors replacing wire-netting that was also a victim of Storm Arwen’s ire. John is left with the Toyota Hilux, where Percy, his eighteen-month-old grandson, is fast asleep in his car seat. Farming is a family business and childcare is part of the job.
John is not in a hurry to wake Percy. He drives slowly across the springy turf that sheep have nibbled over the decades, then pauses the vehicle, looking out towards a landscape that is about to change forever. Over the big boundary wall that marks the southern end of his land, the neighbouring Whitlaw estate, now in the hands of a Jersey-listed company, is about to capitalise on the carbon-offset trade. Large deer fences are being erected and an access road has been built from crushed stone. Soon the ancient turf, host to curlews, larks and black grouse, and, according to Marc, a carbon sink in itself, will be scratched up and new, regimented forest planted. Most of this will be the quick-growing Sitka. Although the impact this type of woodland has on biodiversity is well understood – few species thrive in its dark understorey – it offers quick-growing returns on the timber.
As the engine stills, Percy, a placid little boy who may one day be a farmer in the unknowable future of the 2040s, wakes with a beatific smile.
Note
Robert Cairns took a permanent job as estate mason at Stobo Castle near Peebles in 1911, before serving in the First World War, where he was wounded, gassed and taken prisoner. On his return to Stobo, frustrated at the condition of the drystone dykes which were now in a state of disrepair, he wrote Notes on Dyking for his son, also Robert, who eventually had them published in 1975. The booklet was reprinted as Drystone Dyking by the Biggar Museum Trust in 1986. Robert Cairns died in 1949 at the age of 62. His son wrote: ‘like most of his contemporaries, he gave more than he received.’
The poem quoted at the head of this essay is by Ian McFaden, whose website is here.