Dry Stone Walls are so much part of the Purbeck countryside that it is surprising how rarely we see the men who build and maintain them
Neil Read is one of those men. Born and bred in Swanage, he is as weather-beaten and rugged as the landscape where he has been practising his ancient craft for over twenty years and has developed a respect for both the stone and the landscape.
In his early days Neil worked for the National Trust where repairing dry-stone walls introduced him to a craft for which he rapidly discovered a natural affinity. It was very little time before he was being approached to undertake private commissions, sufficient for him to work full time in a job he loved.
"I soon found out", he says, "that there is a great deal more to building a dry-stone wall than just piling stone on stone. It requires a lot of skill and knowledge to ensure that the wall will remain standing for a great number of years. Because a dry-stone wall has no foundations, nor any mortar, it has to be significantly wider at the bottom than the top. Consideration must be given to drainage, to the effects of wind and weather and to make sure the wall can withstand the attention of the livestock."
Neil regards working out of doors and close to nature as a huge privilege. It is not uncommon to find birds nesting in a wall he is building or some small hibernating creature setting up home for the winter. A countryman through and through, he adopts a 'live and let live' policy and moves to another part of the wall and returns a later date when the visitors have moved on.
Dry stone walls become an integral part of the landscape and must look almost as though they are part of creation: they are never dead straight but follow the natural contours of the land. In Neil's words "The wall has to go with the land."
