The Mudcat Café TM
Thread #161028   Message #3823514
Posted By: Newport Boy
29-Nov-16 - 11:53 AM
Thread Name: Origins: Dry Stone Walling Songs
Subject: RE: Origins: Dry Stone Walling Songs
Another poetic verse:

STONE WALL
Frank Mansell

For monument of native skill
In timeless texture living still
For austere beauty, slowly grown,
Give me a wall of quarried stone.

A wall of Cotswold stone I mean
With toppers set on edge and clean,
Not of the smooth cemented kind
But stone, rough-hewn, with small to bind.

One of the walls that trophies bear
Of rusted scythe and worn-out share,
Of clay pipe stem and cattle bone,
Back to the times Napoleon.

A sturdy wall with middle filled,
The kind of wall they used to build
When horse and cart from quarry plied
The white lanes of the countryside.

A wall where truant tom-cats roam,
That hunting weasels know as home,
A wall where man may cool his head,
Or sleep beneath, or lie down dead.

Blaze on my shield, posterity,
A horse, a plough, a headland tree,
A furrow turned and, circling all,
A tidy stretch of dry stone wall.