Set in stone: 444m stone wall repaired by Galway farmer

Stone walls can be found in almost any county in Ireland, but mainly along the western seaboard. For me, stone walls are synonymous with Co Galway. Travelling up ‘home’ to Tuam where my mother is from, stone walls were the indicator that we were across the border and in Milltown.

Stone walls formed three purposes: firstly, they allowed for the splitting of land parcels into individual fields and paddocks, and secondly they used up the stone-laying in land parcels, as it was cleared for tilling and improvement, removing the necessity to cart them away. Thirdly, a good stone wall provides shelter in the winter and shade in the summer to livestock.

Pat Lynch spent 41 years working for Bord na Móna in nearby Co Offaly, just a stone’s throw (no pun intended) from his drystock farm in Eyrecourt, Co Galway. In 2019, Pat decided it was time to retire from the bog, but didn’t rest on his laurels for long.

The wall in question was then completely overgrown, mostly collapsed and in need of much repair. Over the following four years, he spent much of his time after his daily farming tasks were complete restoring the wall, averaging 15 or 16 hours per week.

Spread over four years or 200 weeks this amounts to over 3,000 man-hours of self-imposed hard labour from which Pat derived great satisfaction and enjoyment.

Pat’s method

“I started out with the worst bits”, explained Pat, “and as I began finishing these, I started repairing the other lengths of the wall, until I had the entire 444 metres complete. It was in a terrible state, with briars and weeds growing out through it and a lot of stone was knocked off the top”.

While most of the stone required was found in situ from the old wall, additional stone was sourced from redundant walls on farmlands of obliging neighbours and some of which Pat had to hand himself.

The wall is 444 metres long, and averages 1.5 metres in height and three-quarters of a metre in width. This gives a total volume of 497m3 of stone required for the structure.

Neighbour, friend and local historian James Scully and his wife Carmel took one of the stones and with her maths teacher wizardry, calculated the relative mass of the wall.

With each cubic metre weighing 2,700kg, the total weight of stone incorporated in the wall is approximately 1,350,000kg or 1,350 metric tonnes.

With every stone reassembled by Pat, this is the volume of stone that he moved by himself over the four-year period. “Some of them stones I handled three times’,’ he stated, “and thank God I haven’t a pain or an ache after building it”.

While much of the wall had fallen in itself, many intact parts were also knocked and rebuilt from the ground up. Pat followed the existing run of the wall, with all of its curves and twists, but when rebuilding he insured that the larger stones ran along the bottom, with smaller stones in between and on top.

“I had a [crow] bar, shovel, spade and my Fiat tractor and box. I’d cart the stones from my neighbours or my own farm up to the wall, using as much as one link box per 3m run.

“With the bar, I’d lever in the larger stones. They must have run out of stone in some parts as they filled the centre of the wall with clay. This was a disaster, as weeds grow in it and pushed the wall out, causing it to burst. I cleaned all the clay out with the shovel, with clean stone used right throughout the wall.’’ Several low spots of the wall, where it went in to a dish of land, were brought up to height by Pat.

James Scully has spent years researching the history of the area. “The wall forms part of the boundary between townlands of Eyrecourt Demesne and Abbeyland Great. It is also the border between the historic civil parishes of Donanaghta (now Eyrecourt) and Clonfert and possibly at one time the dividing line between the estates of the Eyre and Butson families.”

The Eyres family once owned 30,000 acres of land between Galway, Tipperary and Kerry. As subsequent generations passed, the land was sold off piece by piece, with the Land Commission purchasing large tracts of it. Pat’s grandfather was given the parcel of land on which the stone wall sits back in 1952, making Pat the third generation of Lynchs to farm it.

The surrounding landscape is dotted with an array of prehistoric, Early Christian and medieval earthworks, the significance of which is evident in local placenames such as Killevny Fort, Liscuilla, Liskeevan, Lisgar, Lispheasty, Lismoyle, Lisnarabia, Lisphubble, Lisdooaun, Killeleby Fort, Deerpark Fort and Donanaghta Graveyard.

Height

All of these are scattered over the slopes of the hill and stand within a mile or so of the wall. Redmount Hill, which sits across from Pat’s field, reaches a height of 422ft and is surmounted by The Seven Sisters: seven small groves of beech trees erected by the sixth of the John Eyres of Eyrecourt during the 19th century.

“We think this wall was built in the late 1700s to early 1800s, and likely formed the edge of the Eyre’s Estate at the time,” explained Pat, with the old house hidden away in a forest nearby.

“It lasted 200 odd years, so hopefully my work will help it last another 200, though I doubt I’ll be about to fix it then! When you put your mind to something, it’s amazing what you can achieve.”

Solo work on stonemasonry applaudable

Pat undertook a monumental task all by himself, with little fuss made about the whole ordeal. He’s immensely proud of the wall and how it turned out, as he should be.

Not only did he move 1.35 metric tonnes of stone by himself, but the wall is finished to an excellent standard, and as he said himself, should last for many years with minimal maintenance.

On a personal note, I’d like to thank Pat and James for inviting me to see Pat’s work and their hospitality.