Ireland is known for its rolling green hillsides and expansive skies. Yet if you travel across the Emerald Isle, you’ll notice something else, too: hundreds and hundreds of miles of stone walls zig-zagging across the fields. These intricate walls parcel the land into strange shapes that seem to have no reason at all behind them. They look like they should be marking out property lines, but there’s nothing around, save for miles of intersecting stone walls. So what are they?
The walls criss-cross the sides of the Partry Mountains in County Mayo.
First, a little geology: Ireland is mainly composed of limestone. Under more than half the island is a layer of hard, blue limestone, or Carboniferous limestone, which formed about 370 million years ago. You don’t have to dig deep to find this stone, and because of its abundance and easy accessibility, it’s been a favorite building material in Ireland for thousands of years, dating back to the Stone Age.
This house at Inisheer, on the Aran Islands, is made of the same limestone as the walls.
Because the stone was so plentiful, farmers would run into it — literally — while plowing fields. A successful field had to be clear of stones, and so they would be dug out of the soil and simply placed aside. They were also useful when it came to delineating property boundaries and separating fields. Today, those properties no longer exist, but the walls remain.
A wall in Burren.
The amazing thing about the walls is that they have no mortar to hold the stones together, yet have held up against the elements for hundreds of years. They do collapse from time to time, but the precarious stacks hold up remarkably well.
One of the best places to see these walls is on the Aran Islands on Ireland’s west coast. Here, the walls have the usual purposes of marking property and separating fields and livestock, but they also have an agricultural purpose. The soil on the Aran Islands comes in a very thin layer and would blow away in the wind, but the stone walls serve as barriers and keep the soil in place.
From the air, the walls make the landscape of the Aran Islands into a checkerboard.
The Aran Islands are emerging as a tourist destination, with Celtic and early Christian heritage sites that include fortifications and monasteries.
A stone wall on the Aran Islands.
The walls are stacked tightly, but the stones are actually only balanced on each other with no mortar to hold them in place.
(via Amusing Planet)
If you ever venture to Ireland (particularly to the Aran Islands), you won’t have to look far to find these stone walls held up by nothing, since they’re everywhere. They might not seem like much, but they’re just as much signs of history as other, more traditional sites, and some are still in use today.
