*August Highlight*

Stone Walls

We’ve seen them along roadsides and hiked beside them in the woods. Like the coffee shops of urban street corners, stone walls have a ubiquitous presence here in rural Vermont.

Most of the stone walls we see around us today were built in the late 18 th and early 19 th centuries. As European settlers cleared the land to make way for crop fields and pastures, they found that nature had a crop of her own already waiting for them. Harvesting boulder after boulder, rock after rock, the new farmers struggled to rid their fields of these heavy and cumbersome obstacles.

It was the original widespread cutting of the forests that had begun the process; making it seem almost as if the rocks were coming up to see how the new landscape looked. Without the trees, the increase in sunlight reaching the ground caused former forest floor material to decay rapidly. The insulating layer gone, the exposed ground was now more sensitive to fluctuations in temperature. Freezing and thawing reached deeper, and the expanding and contracting forces of water veritably heaved the stones upward to the surface.

Using only the strength of their animals and own bodies, the settlers moved the rocks out of the fields and lined them up and then on top of each other one by one. These linear piles served both as dumping ground and lines of demarcation. Fields were separated from forest, pasture from road, neighbor from neighbor. The stone walls helped lend order to what frequently seemed a chaotic existence.

By the time of the industrial revolution and the opening of the west, many settlers were eager to get out of New England. Packing their essentials, great numbers left the harsh and physically demanding lifestyle behind them. Once abandoned, homesteads of field and pasture frequently reverted back to forest. Many old stone walls fell in to disrepair or became hidden beneath the new growth.

The remnants we see today are not only a testament to the pastoral history of our region, but also represent a contemporary “community center” of sorts. Researchers working at the University of Massachusetts found that in comparison to adjacent fields, a greater flurry of wildlife activity is found along stone walls, and especially in those places where walls meet.

Stone walls have a host of benefits to offer wildlife. Many animals prefer to travel along a wall, making use of its protective cover. Others find the crevices and spaces between rocks an ideal place to nest. The physical structure of the wall itself acts as part barrier, part catchment; collecting and stockpiling rich stores of nutrients as wind and water, bird and beast leave them behind. In the springtime, unique wildflower communities often take advantage of these deposits and flourish. Even the rocks themselves support life, as innumerable lichens and mosses grow on these walls - each type unique in its requirements for light and moisture.

Stone walls have been estimated to cover more than 250,000 miles of New England’s countryside. Where we are lucky enough to find them, these walls offer us a reminder of our heritage, our land, and the gift we possess in our appreciation of nature.