Why the Ancient Craft of Dry Stone Walling Still Holds So Much Appeal in the 21st Century

Why the Ancient Craft of Dry Stone Walling Still Holds So Much Appeal in the 21st Century

Artisans around the world are ditching the mortar and embracing an old method of building rock walls

Photographs by Christie Hemm Klok

July/August 2025

John Shaw-Rimmington started building dry stone walls after the stones themselves complained to him. It was the 1980s, and he was living in Ontario, working for clients who wanted decorative stone veneers affixed to the sides of concrete walls. “The stones were saying, ‘We are not decoration. Do you understand?’ And I said, ‘Yeah, I get it.’” Shaw-Rimmington ditched the concrete and helped revive the ancient craft of dry stone walling.

A dry stone wall is made of nothing but stones, carefully fitted together in such a way that the wall won’t fall down. Gluing the stones with mortar—a paste made of lime or cement mixed with sand and water—is simpler in the short term. But when a dry stone wall breaks, it’s easy to repair. You just have to fix one section, and the wall as a whole remains secure. When a mortared wall cracks, the entire wall is in peril. “We dry stone wallers call mortar ‘the devil’s glue,’” Shaw-Rimmington said. “It smears and it stains and it owns you. Can you make stone walling no fun at all? Yes, try and put mortar in it.” 

People figured out how to make dry stone walls thousands of years ago. In Scotland, dry stone structures date back as far as 5,000 years, to the actual Stone Age. The Maya ruins in Lubaantun, Belize, built around the eighth or ninth century A.D., used dry stone construction. So did the Great Enclosure, an enormous complex in Zimbabwe, built between the 13th and 14th centuries. The Japanese dry stone craft of ano-zumi thrived in the 17th century. The very fact that these walls still stand in any form speaks to the strength of their construction.

Dry stone walls appeared all over Britain after 1604, when so-called “inclosure acts” divided common lands among the elite. The tradition carried on from there. When photographer Christie Hemm Klok traveled to Scotland, she found dry stone boundary walls just down the road from ancient stone settlements like Clachtoll Broch. The building style was so common throughout the country that Scottish locals couldn’t understand why she found the walls so interesting: “I would pull over to photograph a wall, and people would ask me, ‘What are you taking a picture of? That’s just a wall that holds in sheep.’”

But a dry stone wall doesn’t have to look like a sheep pen. An imaginative builder can put the stones together in all sorts of combinations. You start by digging a trench about three to six inches deep and filling it with gravel. Then you assemble each layer, one stone over two, two stones over one. You can shape the stones with a hammer and chisel as you see fit. Some of them, called “tie-through stones,” need to go all the way from one side to the other. Others, called “hearting stones,” are lemon-sized wedges that help keep the interior structure intact. As you build upward, the wall should get narrower. At the end, you set heavy “coping stones” along the top.

As long as you stick to these and other basic principles, you can make all kinds of choices about colors, shapes and patterns. “I always tell my clients, ‘It doesn’t have to be these big, rustic walls,’” said Kristie de Garis, a dry stone waller in Scotland. “You can create really modern lines, a really neat structure. You can space the stones out evenly and create a nice visual flow. You can do pretty much anything with dry stone, actually.”

De Garis also tells her clients that a dry stone wall is an investment in the future. “It’s a proper legacy thing. Mortared walls need to be redone roughly every 15 to 30 years. But there are dry stone walls still standing after thousands of years. What price do you put on forever?”

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You won’t find many dry stone walls in the western United States. When the country expanded, the easiest way to divide properties and fence in animals was with wood and wire. There was no need to build structures that would last, especially given how rapidly the boundaries were changing.

But you can find them in New England. Farmers clearing the forests piled up the rocks partly to get them out of the way. The walls they made weren’t always meticulously constructed, as Robert Frost hints in his 1914 poem “Mending Wall”: “Something there is that doesn’t love a wall, / That sends the frozen-ground-swell under it, / And spills the upper boulders in the sun; / And makes gaps even two can pass abreast.” He describes the process of mending the wall with his neighbor, picking up the rocks that have fallen to each side: “And some are loaves and some so nearly balls / We have to use a spell to make them balance: / ‘Stay where you are until our backs are turned!’”

Frost knew how to craft a poem, but it seems he didn’t quite understand how to put together a wall. “I would say some of my earlier work was kind of like that,” Daniel Peterson, a landscape designer and dry stone walling instructor in the Twin Cities, said with a chuckle. “In our workshops, we teach certain techniques for building with different shaped stones, including round stone. Ideally you don’t want to cross your fingers as you walk away and hope that it stays up.”

Frost was also wrong about the frost: A well-built wall won’t fall down when the frozen ground swells underneath it. Peterson can attest to this, after years of living and working in Minnesota. “When you see a concrete wall, it’s very rigid and has no flexibility. Whereas when you’re building with dry stone, it’s like weaving a rope. It can move and shift as the ground freezes and thaws.” 

Last summer, Peterson traveled to Northern California to teach a dry stone walling workshop there. Christa Moné, the local landscape designer who organized the event, had been struggling to find craftspeople who knew how to carry out her dry stone wall designs. So she reached out to the horticulture program at the nearby junior college, and to retired people and homeowners who wanted to build walls on their own property. Sixteen people showed up to learn from Peterson.

“I’m really trying to mobilize our region and get people interested in these stone walls,” explained Moné, who first fell in love with the structures while she was living in France. “These walls can be firebreaks between vineyards and homes. If there’s a grass fire coming through, it will stop at the wall.” Well-built walls can also be stable during earthquakes, which may seem surprising, given that there’s nothing to hold them together. But while mortar cracks, well-fitted stones can nestle in even more tightly after the ground shakes. And when portions break, they’re easy to fix. “Remember, these walls have been built around the world forever,” Moné pointed out. “When you go to Japan, you see dry stone walls that have withstood giant earthquakes just fine.”

When it comes to aesthetics, Moné has a different challenge than the one de Garis faces in Scotland. Moné’s California clients have no preconceived ideas about dry stone walls. They don’t feel particularly bound to any tradition—they can build a Japanese garden, an English garden, an Italian garden or anything else they choose—but they tend to be drawn to modern materials they see on Pinterest. 

“I tell them that while synthetic materials like vinyl can look really good, there’s a loss of connection when we’re surrounded by them,” Moné said. “When we find ourselves surrounded by natural materials, I think there’s a feeling of relief. But it can be hard to explain to people why they’re going to enjoy that stone wall so much more than a stucco wall. You just have to feel it.”

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Dry stone walls can serve all kinds of functions, but they’re also beautiful just for their own sake. David F. Wilson, a waller from Dundee, Scotland, uses the medium for public art. In his creations, you can see distinct patterns of color, shape and size. “It’s a brilliant material for public spaces because it’s very robust,” said Wilson. “There’s basically no maintenance. And because it’s very textured, it tends not to attract graffiti or vandalism.”

In 2016, Wilson received a Churchill Fellowship, a grant that sends British citizens abroad for four to eight weeks to study advancements in their fields. Wilson traveled to North America to learn about new developments in dry stone walling. “People there are finding their own way of working with stone, and that allows a degree more of personality to come into the-work,” he said. He was astonished when he traveled to New Windsor, New York, and saw Storm King Wall, an art installation by the English artist Andy Goldsworthy. The wall, which was built in the late 1990s and is 2,278 feet long, undulates instead of forming a rigid line. “It’s got this interesting dynamic movement,” said Wilson. “The wall is not a barrier. It weaves in and out of the trees in a way that makes spaces for the trees to shine.”

A few years after Storm King Wall made its debut, Peter Mullins, a landowner in Mendocino, California, decided he wanted to invite stone artists to his ranch. He brought in craftspeople from far and wide, supplying catered meals and kegs of beer as they worked. The site became known as the Mendocino Stone Zone (later, the Mendocino Stone Ranch).

At Mullins’ request, Shaw-Rimmington came down from Canada to build a dry stone stagecoach house. The project amused Shaw-Rimmington—he’d never seen an actual stagecoach house built in that way, and certainly not in California. “But this is fanciful history,” he said approvingly. “It’s iconic, because you walk through the forest and you come across this thing, and it is as if you’ve found something ancient. North America needs more of that.” Shaw-Rimmington and his crew went on to build other projects nearby, like a large stone fence at the Point Arena Lighthouse.

As someone who communes with his materials, Shaw-Rimmington had to make some adjustments in California. Most of the stones at his disposal were left over from other projects and didn’t have a uniform aesthetic. A lot of the rock along the California coast was also less durable than the fieldstone he was used to working with back in Ontario. “The stones, it seemed, were inviting us to be counterintuitive,” he said. 

Frost wrote about forces in nature that don’t love a wall. But to hear Shaw-Rimmington talk, the stones themselves delight in being fitted together by expert hands. “They’re so willing!” he said. “And if they’re not, there are so many lessons you’re learning. It could be you’re using them in the wrong place. Or it could be that you need to just be quiet for a while.” 

Once a wall is complete, he said, the vibrant creative energy remains. “You can sit in front of a well-built dry stone wall and it’s like watching television. You can sit there and look all day, just enjoying the fits, enjoying the way the colors come together. It kind of pours out. It doesn’t get tiresome.” As he sees it, people who use recreational drugs are only trying to get at something like this natural high. He added with a mischievous laugh, “There’s a reason they call it getting stoned.”