Here in what has become known as New England, we just say
stone wall because that’s what everybody says describing a wide variety of
stone constructions.
“Look at this stone wall!” people say to me all the time –
and in my younger days I might have responded “That’s a stone fence – a wall is
something between a floor and a ceiling!”
And I’d make an exception in the case of a retaining wall –
sort of a “segment of stones between two floors” and as anyone familiar with
the works of Paul Simon knows, “One man’s ceiling is another man’s floor.”
These days, I’m more likely to say “Interesting Row of
Stones” before making an assumption that I’m looking at a human made
construction composed of stones - boulders and cobbles of various sizes,
composed of certain types of rock, sometimes as found, sometimes enhanced a
little (or a lot) by human hands using a variety of tools – that is someone’s idea
of a stone fence, “a barrier, railing,
or other upright structure… enclosing an area of ground to mark a boundary, control
access, or prevent escape,” as my first result of a Google Search tells me.
I did cut out the phrase “typically of wood or wire” in that
definition since that doesn’t describe the
material used to create a stone fence at all but does convey the idea
that wooden fences and wire fences are the more easily constructed barriers,
far less trouble than gathering stones, stacking and fitting stones in a way
that will make your intended boundary last for at least a little while as you
control access and prevent escapees from escaping an enclosed area of ground –
either a floor or someone else’s ceiling, especially if you are Paul Simon’s downstairs neighbor.
Making Charcoal without any stones in CT
“Typically of wood or wire” also supposedly brackets the time
frame between when the dire need of New Englanders to enter a time consuming
and labor intensive “Golden Age of Stone Wall Building” began because of Post-Revolutionary
War deforestation and ended with the invention of barbed wire in the 1870s.
Making fences without any stones or barbed wire in CT
In what has become known as New England (and New York), there
were at one time an estimated 250,000 miles of stone walls, according to an
1870 survey by the Department of Agriculture, assumed to have been built by
Post Contact Settler Colonists, many from Great Britain, over a time period that
gets stretched out to 250 years.
I don’t know how reliable that quarter million miles number is,
much less the assumption about the builders.
I also don’t know how reliable this statement is: “In Great
Britain, 70,000 miles of stonewalls were built over a time period of 5,000
years.”
The number pops up
here (as well as in a video by Kevin Gardner, a stone mason who lectures about the
stone fences we call stone walls while he builds miniature stone fences that we
call miniature stone walls): https://www.conservationhandbooks.com/dry-stone-walls-why/
If these Europeans were so slow in the Old World, then how
did they get so fast in the New World??
Motivated by Merino Sheep maybe an important factor: "The majority of New England’s stone walls were built within a 30- year period from 1810-40..." https://www.concordmonitor.com/The-History-and-Ecology-of-Stone-Walls-7163910
No comments:
Post a Comment