Jaffe Update 8: A Reflection on Walls.

On my final post for my blog, I posted this after the flight home, concerning my final day: 

I thought of the walls that Jacob and I saw throughout the UK. In the US, when you want to separate two plots of farm land, you set up a fence, or plant a bush, or us it as a small private road. However, from what we saw, in the UK, you build a stone wall.

These stone walls aren't impersonal; they're only four feet tall, and look quite poorly put together, as though they might fall. Yet they likely stay standing for centuries, as the quantity of moss (or is it a lichen) growing on many of them can attest to. Jacob and I both found them quite asthetically pleasing: they rolled across the countryside, splitting off in all directions at the corners of plots of land and going this way and that, enclosing sheep and cows within their warm, inviting, mossy (licheny?) surfaces.

Whenever I looked at them as we biked, I couldn't help but think, "Somebody, or some group of people at one point decided to gather those thousands, millions, hundreds of millions of stones, move them onto a designated imaginary line that they probably made up, and stack them. These walls likely changed owners over the years, but they still do the same thing now as they did then: separate land and keep in animals. Those people from generations past set the framework for those in the present to work off of and use. And here these walls are today, still intact, barely modified, and overall, quite beautiful."