Why building drystone walls in Perthshire means so much to me
Kristie De Garis explains why she learned to build drystone walls and how the process had a profound effect
I left Edinburgh because I’d been living against the grain of myself. Although I wasn't sure what I was looking for, Perthshire felt like a chance for something else. Growing up in Caithness, drystone walls ran along the edge of every road and every field. As a child I'd been drawn to them in the particular way lonely children are drawn to things that feel like company.
Sitting with my hands on the mossy stones, I felt as if I could see through the eyes of the person who'd placed them. I didn’t expect drystone to find me again, but Perthshire brought it all back. A few weeks after we moved, a friend took me to Craignavar, a ruined settlement in the hills of Glen Almond. The ground was boggy, the familiar suction from recent rain underfoot.
Strewn across the hillside were 22 buildings, a corn-drying kiln, and agricultural enclosures. In some places, the past doesn’t settle into the ground. At Craignavar, it sat in the air around me, and in the proud piles of fallen stone. It was there I realised that, despite my fascination, I had no idea how drystone walls were built. Or by whom.
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A lesson about belonging
That’s the thing about Scotland’s drystone walls: they’re there and feel like they always have been. As if they were created, not by diligent human hands, but by the land itself. So, I learned to build drystone. As a woman, there is something about lifting and placing stone – heavy, indifferent, older than any human concern – that has reset the relationship to my physical self.
The finished product is directly related to my physicality; there's no separating the two. My body brings these walls – walls that will last hundreds, if not thousands, of years – into existence. Being mixed-race in an almost entirely white country, drystone has taught me about belonging. How it can be shaped, how it can be chosen. The belonging I'd known before was conditional. Something to be earned by making myself small and agreeable and safe.
Drystone offered something different. Every wall I build becomes part of place and history: a visible record of my presence, skill, and care. I am part of this land in a way very few are. As a neurodivergent person, it has shown me the environments where my mind is at its best.
I spent years trying to work around a brain that resisted the conditions it was placed in. Drystone helped me understand what I need. It has also taught a very busy mind patience, although that's something I relearn every time I meet the wall.
And at the most fundamental level, it has made me feel that change is possible. We so rarely get to shape the environments we live in. We so rarely get to be part of an embodied, physical legacy. Drystone has changed my relationship to the past, present and future. To how I experience time and consequence, but also action.
I moved to Perthshire looking for something I couldn't quite name. I think drystone has been helping me name it ever since.
Kristie De Garis, author of the memoir Drystone: A Life Rebuilt, will be at Boswell Book Festival this Saturday
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