Traveling through rural Ireland from east to west, one thing that piques the curiosity of many tourists is the hundreds of kilometers of stone walls that stretch across farmland in every direction as far as the eye can see. These stone walls are a familiar sight for the Irish themselves, and for tourists they raise a lot of questions.
Let's try to answer these questions …
Although green fields are mostly visible everywhere in Ireland, in fact, under the lush green carpet, literally a few centimeters deep, there is a thick layer of hard, blue limestone. This famous blue limestone is found throughout the country.
Ireland is a mostly rocky island made up of Carboniferous limestones that formed about 370 million years ago. At the time, Ireland was part of a shallow sea between two land areas near the equator. The continental shift lifted part of the seabed above sea level in what would later become Ireland. Over the course of hundreds of millions of years, marine sediments have evolved into hard, fine-grained limestone.
Extracted from the earth, these stones have become the most commonly used building material for the Irish people. From the buildings of the Stone Age, the Burren Crypt, to cathedrals, castles and monasteries of the Middle Ages, these stones were used as building materials everywhere. Particularly ubiquitous are the stone walls that cross the entire country.
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Even in ancient times, the inhabitants of the villages, cultivating their fields for planting potatoes, found rock blocks of different sizes of different sizes. The most rational use of these "gifts of the earth" was the use of this material for the construction of houses and hedges.
The whole family, the Irishmen carried the stones found from the field to its outskirts, where craftsmen laid them in neat fences. It should be noted that no reinforcing mortars (such as cement) were used during installation.
Thus, stone walls arise not only as a result of clearing agricultural fields, but also as delimiters of the property of neighboring farmers.
Thus, divisions appeared that determined the location of the land of each farmer. Inside their plot, each of the owners tried to divide the field into smaller plots so that grazing cows and sheep would eat only a certain area of the grass, while the rest of the greenery grew quietly untouched.
So these monuments of the past have survived to the present day. Now, using various decorative tricks, you can build such a fence from ordinary blocks, covering them with tiles made to look like a stone. And the cement mortar helps to make such a wall more durable.
In rural areas, farmers complain that such walls crumble and collapse from time to time. Sometimes strong winds can damage such a stone fence. Yes, and a huge truck, driving in for milk to a farmer, sometimes picks up and hooks on a stone hedge, which has stood motionless for many decades.
One of the most beautiful places to see an extensive network of stone walls is the Aran Islands. The Aran Islands are a group of three islands located at the mouth of Galway Bay on the west coast of Ireland. The largest island is Inishmore, also known as Aranmore. The second largest is Inishmaan Island and the smallest and easternmost is Inishir Island.
The inhabitants of these islands, over the millennia, have created life where previously there was nothing but rocks alone. People have developed a unique technique used for farming. Today, the islands are incredibly green with low stone walls dividing agricultural fields, grazing fields and keep a thin layer of fertile soil from being blown away by the winds.