30th October 2024

It is not given to most of us to create something which lasts for five hundred years or more and has been seen and admired by thousands.

I come from dry-stone wall country – walls built without mortar, stones carefully chosen to fit together making a strong wall to last in hill country and mountain weather. Who were they who built these walls to surround fields, separate fields from open moorland or climb hundreds of metres of steep hillside to separate one valley’s grazing from another? They were ordinary people who lived there, not masons, and they had learned how to do it from fathers and grandfathers.

I wonder at their skill and persistence and try to imagine the time and effort in carrying stones from their fields or nearby rivers or their own quarrying. They had no diggers, lorries or Land Rovers to get heavy stones up the hill. They did it because they needed to keep sheep safe and because they couldn’t pay someone else to do it. It must have taken years in some cases. Their work still inspires awe.

So what of us who will never make anything so enduring?

I find two quotations of very different dates helpful.

Archbishop Desmond Tutu (1931 – 2021): “Do the little bit of good where you are; it is those little bits of good that overwhelm the world.”

And St. David (c 500 – 589) to his monks when dying: “Be joyful, keep the Faith, do the little things you have seen me do.”

Margaret Clements