A late autumn afternoon hiking the forest in the Green Mountains you will come across these ancient walls. Here we have the low winter sun raking the hillside under a thin coating of snow. These walls were built 200 years ago using oxen and stoneboats. They were a way to use all of the stone left in the soil after the glaciers retreated. All of Vermont was agricultural in the past so there are thousands of miles of walls across the landscape. If you dig or plow the soil here you can’t help but unearth field stone. The easiest thing for the farmers to do was build walls with all the stone both to delineate property lines and fields and keep in animals.

These walls lend a sense of time and history to the landscape. Since Vermont has substantially reforested over the last century most of the walls are in deep forest now. The juxtaposition of the wildness of the forest with the hand-wrought aspect of these ancient walls I find moving. They show the temporality of our existence on the land.

#2111201, psalm 170

20″x16″, oil on linen