Sure Sex Is Great But...Have You Ever Built A Wall That Will Last Hundreds Of Years?

Drystone walling is hard graft.

It’s stubborn too. Doing what you can with what you have. A resistance of sorts.

When life gives you stone…you build.

I’m not sure what drew me to drystone. Some memory of the stones from my childhood in Caithness? The romantic notion of working with my hands? An interest in dismantling or subverting traditional male-centric spaces? There’s probably some truth to each of those.

In drystone there’s no mortar—everything is held together by fundamental mechanical forces. When you first start building, it’s hard to imagine the long-term effects of any of your decisions. Most seem inconsequential. It’s near impossible to visualise the monumental obligations on one stone over decades, or how a waller’s impatience can mean the difference between a wall that lasts three-hundred years and one that lasts just thirty.

The stones are shaped by the land, and then by me. It’s my job to lift them, place them, pin them. To build something that lasts. When built properly, a drystone wall will stand for centuries. It doesn’t ask permission from time or weather or the hands that built it. It endures because that’s what it does. That’s what it was built to do.

There’s a lie women are sold, a quiet, relentless one: that our worth is tied to being desired. That being wanted is proof that we exist in the right way. I lived this lie for the largest part of my life. Built myself around it. But desire is fleeting. A drystone wall isn’t.

I remember the day I built my first wall. Lower back aching, hands and arms weakened from the tough manual labour, I lay in bed and swiped through photos. Where there once was a gap, now stood a wall. I slid my thumb back and forth.

Gap, then wall. Gap, wall. Built by me.

Although the walls I created in my garden had led me here, they had eventually been dismantled, to my exaggerated moans of distress, for grass the kids could play on. The wall in the pictures was the first proper thing I had ever constructed.

Feeling proud, and some kind of powerful, I was aware of something shifting within me. In drystone, the finished product is directly related to physicality. There’s no separating the two. Looking at what I’d built, I knew without any doubt that my body had brought it into existence. This wall wasn’t just my first contribution to the long tradition of drystone in Scotland. No. It was indisputable. A demonstration of the undeniable value of my physical form.

Put simply, when I realised I could build a wall that would last hundreds of years, men wanting to fuck me felt a little irrelevant.

I don’t think of drystone walling as empowering. That word has been softened too much, reshaped to be smaller, superficial. What I felt in that moment (what I still feel now) wasn’t any of those things. It was solid, permanent, immovable.

Adapted from my book ‘Drystone - A Life Rebuilt’ out August 7th 2025.

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