Case Study 1 - DRY Stone Walls

Case study: Building Volunteer Skills 
The Burren landscape is a maze of stone walls with  incredible aesthetic value and also important for stock and land boundary use. Stone walls are highly laborious to build from scratch and hard work to maintain.   With increasing emigration of young people from rural areas in the west of Ireland, stone wall maintenance is becoming a harder job for an older farming population to manage.   Aside from helping the farmer with wall rebuilding, the BCVs are also exposed to a Burren tradition that is highly skilled and has been carried out for over a thousand years, rebuilding a piece of history. 

The BCVS recently carried out a day long stone wall workshop

Extract from the stone wall workshop by Karin Funke
Instead of being built, perfectly functional drystone walls were actually dismantled. But there was method to the madness: Burrenbeo with the help of a heritage grant by Galway County Council had organised a drystone wall workshop with local landowner John Connolly, as well as stone mason and heritage guide Rory O’Shaughnessy, on how to build and repair drystone walls. John has vast experience in building this kind of wall because, as a boy, he had to walk from the farm over to where we had our workshop, make a gap in the wall, get the horses out for a day’s work, and in the evening, after bringing the horses back, rebuild the gap in the wall. That is until he got smart and stuck a dead whitethorn in the gap. He was also fortunate enough to work with a neighbour of his, a gifted stone wall builder, who would turn every stone up to 6 times before finding the perfect spot in the wall for it.

The workshop started with a lesson in why certain stacking techniques are more successful than others when building drystone walls which are basically walls without mortar or any other binding agents.  We also learned that the gaps between the rocks are actually good for putting up less resistance to the wind which prolongs the walls’ lifespan considerably!
Rory and John started to take down several parts of a wall, and groups of two and three of the Burrenbeo Conservation Volunteers went to work at each gap, trying to fill them up again. Then John showed us how to build a double stone wall from scratch.  We learned that a double stone wall is not two single walls stuck together, but a wider stone wall with two “faces”, i.e. where, with the exception of the ‘through’ stones, you can’t see the same stone sticking out on either side of the wall.  John talked us through the tools and safety gear needed for this kind of work, and then, not unlike a swarm of bees, we started to build up the wall.

From the youngest members of the group who were not much taller than the sledge hammers, to the oldest, we gathered suitable stones for the foundation (fidín in Irish), the middle bit and the top part which looked again like a single dry stone wall. The ultimate test for the durability and stability of the wall was delivered by one member of the team when he walked on top of our newly erected wall. There was not even a wobble in the stones under his feet!

We had a great day with lots of banter and laughter, and we actually learned much about wall building without realising it. So we will be able to use our newly acquired skills when coming across derelict walls on our Burrenbeo Volunteers’ days out.

Karin Funke works at the Burren Smokehouse.  She has been a Burrenbeo Conservation Volunteer since February 2010 and participated in various of the Burrenbeo Conservation Volunteer outings that take place.