Good fences make good neighbours – homage to stone craft that’s been honed for generations | Southern Star

WE stand on either side. Deliberating. My neighbour and I. A wall between us. A distance eased by his easy way of being.

BY PEADAR KING

But a delicate conversation nonetheless. Neither of us wants to impose on the other. ‘Whatever you think? If it works for you. Yeah, no.’ Walls are delicate things, even strong walls. They can easily give offence. ‘Good fences make good neighbours’, we joke. It’s an old joke. A joke told to fill the gap. Today there are just two neighbours and a wall. Most likely a wall that was built many years ago by two other men. Two other men who stood as we are standing now. Talking across a wall. Talking across walls is an exception in this increasingly walled world in which we are all living. Berlin in 1961. A city cleaved in half. A people divided. A fifteen feet high wall constructed. Topped with barbed wire and guarded with mines, watchtowers. And heavily armed soldiers. That wall came down.

But that proved to be an exception. Thirty years later, the world has more walls than ever. From six in 1989, there are now at least 63 physical walls along borders or on occupied territories across the world. Palestine/Israel. Mexico/United States of America. Western Sahara/Morocco. Theirs is the longest continuous wall in the world, 2,700 km in total. The land on either side of the wall is the most land mined in the world. There, I was told to tread carefully, to pick my steps, to only step where my guide stepped. I did. A turkey in a stubble field. Our place is also a walled place. Walls, at their time of construction were meant to divide. Walling in. Walling out. Markers of distinction. Clear class constructions. Constructed by those without privilege for those who believed themselves to be privileged. All of which was a long time ago now. Long before my arrival in this place. But memory remains.

Memories embedded in those walls. Memories that live on in stories from a different age. Lest we forget. The walls too carry other stories. Stand as testimony to the craft of the men who constructed them. Vernacular architecture at it best. That is our inheritance. Those of us who live in this place and those who come and go. Stone upon stone. To feel the stone is to feel what they felt but without the pain or a different kind of pain. Theirs was a chiselled back-breaking pain. Dark winter days when the cold must have penetrated the cores of their bodies. Day labourers I suspect.

The reserve army of labour to call up that great Marxist phrase. The reserve army left over from those who were forced to act as a reserve army of labour elsewhere. That elsewhere that, for the most part, the privileged few called home. We meet again on either side of the wall. A familiarity has grown. An ease. It has been agreed in our mutual households that whatever we want to do with the wall, we can. We agree something must be done. What was once stone upon stone has now become unstable, partially dislodged. Knotted fuchsia driving them apart. Options. Leave very well alone. Let nature takes its course.

Take them down one by one and start again. Old stones that hold the possibility of a newly invigorated wall. A mended wall. We are, as the Pulitzer prize winner and United States poet laureate Robert Frost has written in

Mending the Wall.

…at spring mending-time…

We wear our fingers rough with handling them.

He only says, ‘Good fences make good neighbors.’

Spring is the mischief in me, and I wonder

‘Why do they make good neighbors? Isn’t it

Where there are cows? But here there are no cows.

Before I built a wall I’d ask to know

What I was walling in or walling out…

And so I begin. Taking down the wall. Stone by stone. Each its own shape, its own weight, its own colour. And I arrange these stones for other hands. Laying them carefully on the ground. And I harvest the earth that has bound them. For the garden. The garden that has taken shape in my head but as yet is to find expression in the ground. For now I have a grey garden of stone. Flat, round, regular, irregular. Each with its own shape, its own beauty. Each will eventually find a home in the wall my neighbour and I will oversee its construction. Not by our own hands. More skillful hands will come and do that. Hands that know stone. Hands marked by years of stone craft. Stone craft that has been honed through the generations that have inhabited this place. This living breathing place of stone.