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My morning and evening dog walks generally take me round the same big field. It’s just been ploughed and is all soil just at the moment. The soil is packed with stones, like loads of them. I don’t know if that is a good thing for the crop that they grow there (peas last year) or if they are just making do the best that they can. But the stones annoy me.
At the moment I am mainly walking round the edge of the field, but I have started running some of it, in the hope that I can build up my fitness enough to get back into covering large distances. Certainly the last time I lost weight, running 7 miles once or twice a week really helped shift the flab.
But those stones also litter the pathway and so make running a little uncomfortable and risk twisting an ankle, so I have started kicking some of them out of the way into the hedgerow. And if there’s a big one I stop and pick it up and throw it into the hedgerow. Sometimes I kick it and realise that it was too big to be kicked and hurt my foot.
It’s nice to have an extra task to do on what is a bracing and beautiful, but mildly dull daily routine.
I started wondering if I could clear the path of all stones - even the really small ones. It would be hard because many are encrusted in the soil. And then I started wondering if, in the 700 walks a year I might do round this field, whether I could attempt to rid the whole thing of stones. I mean, clearly I couldn’t, it takes 20 minutes to walk round the edge of it (the main picture only shows a tiny part of the field, the other picture shows you how many stones are in a square metre). It’s massive. But what kind of a man would let that stop him.
The farmer wouldn’t notice, not to begin with, but after a couple of years he might think that the periphery of the field was a little soilier than before. Maybe after a few more years the hedgerows would have so many stones tossed into them that they would become makeshift dry stone walls. No one would know who was doing this - I am like a Great Escaper surreptitiously moving the earth around as I walk. And I would never tell anyone what I was doing or that I was they mysterious man responsible. But even so, somehow I think that as the project progressed over decades (and maybe beyond my death as I handed my secret project on to my children) it would still somehow become known as the Herring wall. People would come to view it and the remarkably stone free field that as once full of stones. Where did they go? Oh yes, into the wall - people would realiss that pretty quickly.
I am not sure the farmer would be happy. Maybe his crop needs stony land and maybe a wall made of stones would be a danger rather than a tourist attraction. And every time the field was ploughed, more stones would appear from beneath the soil, meaning that even if I could clear the top level (and also, to be fair, it might be difficult to do very much once the crops had started to grow, so it might be an intense month a year where I did most of the clearing.
It would be a life well lived, an actual achievement - even If no one actually wanted it. I have a vague memory of someone doing something like this in Asia or somewhere, clearly a field, a few stones at a time.
How long would it take in this huge field, even to effectively clear the path? Who knows? But I am going to find out. I’ve done a couple of good days on the project already, mainly kicking stones off the path, occasionally picking up a few, occasionally darting on to the ploughed field if I see a particularly big stone.
My work will last millennia. What have you done this week which will have such a lasting impact on the world?
I am not crazy.
Another guest announced for RHLSTP
November 12th I will be chatting with the magnificent beast that is Sanjeev Bhaskar.
Or one of the others.
Shit, it starts next week.
