A Galloway Drystone-Waller - Margery Price October 1962

I am fascinated by dry stone walling and would like to do a short, two-day course sometime soon. Not long ago, on one of my tours, I stopped to chat with a dry-stone waller working at the roadside. I was struck by one of his comments during our chat, "When you pick up a stone you don't put it down, you must use it."

So when I came across this article, in the October 1962 edition of "Cycle Camper" I thought it was worth republishing! The wall is still standing there and will be long into the future, you can see it on stage 6 of this Walk Highlands guide.

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The South-west of Scotland has some of the most beautiful country in these islands and some of the most atrocious weather. Its magnificent mountains have all the primeval solitude of the Highlands, with the added joy of that sense of personal discovery one loses in the scenically famous districts.

As always in the west, however, one has to chance wind, rain and mist, and in Galloway mist above all, is a product of the humid atmosphere of the Solway coast. So it was that on Benyellary, 2300 ft. satellite of Merrick, Galloway's highest mountain, I was cheated of Merrick himself by the mist which swirled up to the 2700 ft. summit from the wild country of odd-shaped lochs with strange names that stretches away to the Rhinns of Kells in the east. Further climbing was pointless, except for the purely physical exercise or the kudos of peak-bagging.

Sitting in the lee of the wall which runs the length of the ridge connecting Benyellary and Merrick, I reflected ruefully how mist had similarly robbed me of Corserine, highest peak of the Kells range, the previous year. After half-an-hour, I gave the Galloway weather best and proceeded to follow the wall back to where I knew a descent could be made to Glentrool.

I had seen no-one on the mountain, except for a very unsuitable-dressed trio of Bank Holiday tourists, probably from England, who would fare ill in the rain which now joined the mist. I thought of Lakeland's hills across the Solway, and idly speculated how many one would encounter on Scafell Pike on a reasonably promising Whit-Sunday such as this one appeared before the mist and rain rolled up. Praying that Galloway might remain thus undiscovered in my lifetime, I noticed a stake driven into the ground by the side of a very substantial stone wall, and a little farther along a figure appeared, beside a second stake.

He was a sturdy countryman in late middle age, dressed in cap and ancient Burberry, and he gave me the Good-day I have learned to expect from the men of the Scottish hills.

"Are ye no' frightened o' getting lost?" he asked.

I reassured him as to my experience of hill-walking, and in turn asked him the point of the stakes beside the wall. He told me they were used to measure the wall, which he was repairing under contract.

This wall, which ran up Benyellary and skirted Merrick at about 2000 ft., was higher and more substantial than most of the stone walls in the North of England. It was rougher, and its stones were larger and rounded. Repairing it would seem a man- sized job indeed.

"We're up here from April to September, two lads and myself, in our tent back yonder", explained the drystone-waller.

I had noticed a tent beside the wall on my way up, supposing it to belong to someone who, like myself, loved mountain quiet and knew it was to be found in Galloway's hills. My own very new small tent occupied its first site by the loch in the Glentrool Camping Ground (now Galloway Forest Holiday Park) , but it would not be long before I, too, took to the tops.

Never before, however, had I heard of a countryman who lived in a tent, not even in Scotland, where camping is a normal form of holiday accommodation for town-dwellers of all ages and both sexes. I was still more surprised when I learned the man was actually a Lakelander.

“We tried working from the farm down below", he said, "But we found we were wasting so much time getting up and down that we thought we'd try out a tent. Oh, aye, we're comfortable enough. We have a tidy-sized oil-stove, and one of the lads fetches up supplies from the farm while t'other lad and myself are working.”

I inspected the tent at closer quarters on my way down, as I had to hug the wall so as to keep my bearings until below the mist- level. It was a sturdy, sizeable, khaki affair with a stout fly- sheet and strong guy-ropes, and I could well imagine it would provide comfortable, if hardly luxurious, living.

I reflected upon the advantages of retreating from the world of people and pinpricks, row and rush, to battle quietly and steadily with such elemental things as stone and earth and weather. There would be bad days of clinging mist, or high wind, or soaking rain; there would also be golden days when the hills rose blue as only the hills of Galloway can, days of a beauty so intense that it hurts. Did the wallers enjoy those days I wondered, or did they merely use them to get more work done in the hope of an earlier return to the fleshpots?

Below the wall, several hundred feet down, stood the deserted shepherds' house at Culsharg, beside the Buchan Burn, and there I sheltered to make tea on the pocket-stove which accompanies most walkers of Scotland's hills. A year or two later, in the magic spell of Skye, I met a young man who had been born in that very house, a shepherd who enjoyed his work on a Highland ranch-farm, and found the company of the Highland folk more congenial than that of his fellow Gallowayians. But he missed the hills of Galloway; beside them, Skye and its glories were as nothing. We talked long of Galloway, and I told him of my encounter with the tent-dwelling drystone-wallers. He agreed such a job would just have suited him, and I saw that Galloway had laid her lovely hands on him, the native, just as surely as on me, the visitor. Perhaps my own escapism in thinking wistfully of a summer upon the Merrick may be excused."