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Turns out building dry stone walls is difficult

Tom Scott | August 12, 2026



At the Dry Stone Academy, @DrBecky and I try one of the oldest surviving crafts in Britain: dry stone walling. | Next episode RIGHT NOW on Nebula: https://nebula.tv/videos/tomscott-this-100yearold-ride-must-never-change-again | England series map: https://www.tomscott.com/england/

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Written and presented by
Tom Scott

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for Penny4 https://penny4.co.uk/
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Subtitles by So Speedy https://www.sospeedy.co.uk/

With thanks to the Historic County Borders Project https://www.county-borders.co.uk/

Select imagery/video supplied by Getty Images

Executive Producer
Tom Scott

© Pad 26 Limited MMXXVI

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Written by Tom Scott

Comments

This post currently has 35 comments.

  14. @surelyijest

    August 12, 2026 at 8:11 pm

    I grew up in New England, another region known for its dry stone walls. The stones here tend to be a lot rounder, and a bit bigger, leading to very rustic walls And most of the walls were built to separate farms rather than to mark fancy estates, so the builders were probably less concerned with aesthetics and more focused on getting a wall up quickly. There's said to be over 100,000 miles of old walls here, often running through forests that used to be farmland.

  20. @EntropiaGuitars

    August 12, 2026 at 8:11 pm

    An interesting fact I'm not sure it's been mentioned yet, but there's 1349 comments at the time of writing and mine will be 1350 – I'm not scrolling through all of those … the maker of a dry stone wall is known as a Cowan.

  28. @IOUaUsername

    August 12, 2026 at 8:11 pm

    I can tell you why the taper on these walls is called a "batter". When you're driving a digger, "battering" means to create a slope out of loose dirt. It comes from the way you need to batter the dirt into place if using a tamping mattock, if you don't have a digger.

  30. @ThePineapple3112

    August 12, 2026 at 8:11 pm

    It's honestly similar to the phone book (or dictionary) trick where if you interlock every page, the friction alone can support the weight of a car. Similar principle here when weaving the stones together

  33. @josiebee-e6e

    August 12, 2026 at 8:11 pm

    Me again. I was visiting the Stones of Callanish just a few weeks ago. Surrounding them in the fields were dry stone walls. A ship load of tourists (yes more tourists than the standing stones arrived, wrecking my photo opp!!).

    Soon I heard an exclamation from one of them “hey look…there’s a classic dry stone wall!” So pleased with himself he banged off several images. I didn’t have the heart to tell him the wall was in bad shape and there were collapses every few feet! The wall looked like a mountain range of peaks and valleys.

  35. @josiebee-e6e

    August 12, 2026 at 8:11 pm

    Batter uses virtually the same letters as buttress. Maybe t’lad of old were raght fed oop wi’ a long word like buttress, and just shorted it to batter?

Comments are closed.

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