THE ESSENCE OF CRAFT

After I left university, and the rarified air of academia, I threw myself into the heavily physical world of rebuilding an old house. One of the first skills I learnt was working with stone, initially with mortar, but later the much more satisfying art of dry-stone-walling (without mortar). For a bit of cash I would repair tumbled stone walls, or 'dykes', as the Northumberland farmers called them. On one side is a formless and random mass of rocks, as they would have emerged from the earth. On the other side is a gaping hole in the dyke. By the end the scattered rubble has gone and all the stones are neatly fitted into a tight and incredibly strong structure, the agrarian delineation of the dyke restored.

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