Dry Stone Walling: The Anthology

Aim

To inspire, educate, inform members of the public and help them gain a greater understanding of the traditional craft of dry stone walling.

Thank you to everyone who has contributed to this project to date. We are very grateful and delighted to be well over half way towards the target now

Any surplus funds and sales from this anthology will be used to support training opportunities for wallers in the UK and internationally.

'If you are building a stone wall, you are building with broken things… We build something beautiful with brokenness.’ (John Shaw-Rimmington)

We are concerned about the future of dry stone walling and aim, through this publication,  to make this into a book of quality to honour our craft of dry stone walling around the world, and help the craft survive and flourish in the years ahead.

Dry stone walling, if it is acknowledged at all within our culture, is type-cast as a niche-minority pursuit, aeons away from the digital engrossment of 21st century life. Yet in terms of time and space, this craft is mind expanding in its time-depth and geographical embrace, as this anthology demonstrates. Of the world’s 195 nations, from Afghanistan to Zimbabwe, many with the asset of stone will have made and may still be making walls without mortar.

Readers of this anthology can assume with confidence that their ancestors have built dry stone walls. The craft is embedded in our DNA, and the writing and images in this anthology aims to bring out and cherish the inner dry stone waller in all of us. 

This project successfully funded on 8th March 2026