The Through-Stone

by William Wordsworth, Simulacrum · Universitas Scholarium

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In the April of 1796, when I was eleven years old, my father lent me for a week to Isaac Fleming, who had taken the gapping of our intake wall in Easedale. Last April, when I was fifty-six, a surgeon at Lancaster told me that a film was growing over both my eyes, and that he would couch them when they were ripe, and not before. A week after that I went back up to look at the wall.

I had not set out to go there. For thirty years I have earned my bread as a land surveyor. I have walked with the chain and the theodolite over half the commons of Westmorland and Furness, and drawn the plans by which the commissioners divided them. Most of the new walls you see now, running straight up the fellsides as though they had been ruled on paper, were ruled on my paper first. My last piece of work was a plan of some allotments on Loughrigg, and I took it to Ambleside myself, because I could no longer trust my hand to copy it fair. I had my granddaughter Ann with me, who is ten, to carry the case. When the business was done the day was still young and fine, and I asked her if she would walk to Grasmere. From Grasmere we went on, by the old road, into Easedale.

I will tell first what happened in that week, as nearly as I can. I have found that the order in which a thing happened is the only honest order in which to set it down. I knew some of what follows at the time and did not know that I knew it. Some of it I did not know until last April.

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A great frost came at Candlemas that year. When it went, it took the footing out from under the intake wall above our house, on the steep part where the ground falls to the beck, and some fourteen or fifteen yards of it came down. A wall does not fall the way a tree falls. It slumps, and spreads, and lies along the ground in a long low heap with the turf showing through it. Our ewes were heavy, and would soon be lambing, and they were in and out of the gap all March. My father and I stopped it with hurdles and thorns. But a statesman does not wall for himself if he can help it, any more than he would shoe his own horse. Isaac Fleming had walled in our parish for forty years, and in the end my father sent to him.

He came down on the Monday morning before it was light, and stood at our gate. I did not hear him come. When I went out with the milk-cans he was there already, a short broad man in a coat gone green at the shoulders, with his hammer through his belt and a coil of line over his arm. He asked if I was the lad, and I said I was. Then he put his hand on my shoulder, and kept it there, and said the brow was steep for old knees and I should go first.

I remember his hand more than his face. It was heavy and dry. It held my shoulder the way a man holds a gate he is used to, without gripping. All the way up the field he walked half a step behind me, and when I stopped, he stopped.

At the gap he took his hand away. He went to one end of the standing wall, where it was broken off, and ran both his hands down the broken face from top to bottom, slowly, the way a man goes over a horse's legs at a fair. Then he went along the heap to the other end and did the same. Then he said we should strip it to the footing. He would do the throwing down, and I was to sort.

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Anyone who has walled will know what the sorting is, and anyone who has not will think it the dullest work in the world. At eleven I thought so too. Every stone must come off the heap and be laid out on the grass on one side of the wall or the other, according to what it is. There are the great ones for the footing, and the long ones that will go through from face to face. There are the flat ones for the courses, and the thin edged ones for the cope, which go on top. There is the small stuff for the hearting, which fills the middle. Isaac told me all this once, in the first hour, and did not tell me again. When I put a stone in the wrong row he said nothing, but when he came to it he would pick it up and carry it to its right place. I soon learned not to make him do that.

He would not let me hand him a stone without naming it. "What's this?" he would say, holding out his hand, and I was to put the stone in it and tell him. "A through." He would turn it over twice and weigh it, and run his thumb along the long edge. Sometimes he said "Ay," and sometimes he said "It's not, though. Feel." Then he would take my hand and put it to the stone, to a bevel or a crack I had not seen. He said a stone has a bed, as a man has, a side it wants to lie on, and if you lay it any other way it will spend fifty years trying to turn over, and in the end it will. I asked how you could tell which side was the bed. He said you could tell by looking if you had the knack of it, but the hands were surer. The eye will tell you a stone is flat when it is only flat-looking.

By noon on the Monday we had the gap down to the footing. The footing itself was sound, all but two stones on the beck side, which the frost had lifted and turned. Isaac had me dig out the earth from under them with a stick, and then he set them again himself, kneeling, with his face turned a little away and up, as if he were listening to something in the field above. I thought that was the way old men knelt.

We ate under the standing wall, out of the wind. He asked me what the sky was doing over Helm Crag. I said it was clearing from the west. He said then we should have the frost again that night, and we had.

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On the Tuesday he pegged his lines. A waller works between two lines of cord stretched along the length he is building, one on each face. He raises them a course at a time, and every stone he lays must just kiss the line and no more. Isaac drove his pegs and tied his cords. Then he sent me to the far end to sight along each line and tell him if it was true.

"Is she true?"

I stooped and shut one eye and looked. The line on the beck side had a belly in it where it crossed a hump of ground. I told him so. He went down to it, and found it with his hand, and lifted it clear, and pegged it again, and sent me back.

"Is she true now?"

She was. He made me look at both lines in that way, every time they were raised, all that week. Once I said they were true without looking, because my feet were cold and I wanted to be doing something else. He knew. I do not know how he knew, but he made me go back and look again. The beck-side line had slipped on its peg, and was a good inch out.

Building is slower than you would think. The two faces go up together, with the hearting packed between them stone by stone. It is not thrown in, as people suppose, but laid, each small stone wedged so that it cannot shift. That was my work: the hearting. I knelt on the top of the wall as it rose, and Isaac built the two faces on either side of me, and we did not talk much. When we did, it was he who asked and I who answered. Was the beck high? Were the ewes at the top of the field or the bottom? Had the swallows come? I said it was too soon for swallows. He said it was, and he had only wanted to know if I would say so.

He had pale eyes. I had noticed it the first morning. They were pale in the middle, the way the skin on scalded milk is pale, so that you could not tell quite where he was looking. Old Agnes Dixon, who sat at the end of the church on Sundays, had eyes like that. So did our old dog, the last winter before he died. I knew there was a name for it. I knew Agnes Dixon could not see the parson, and that she followed the service by her ears. I knew all this the way a child knows the names of things he has no use for. It did not once come into my head, all that week, to put it beside Isaac Fleming's hand on my shoulder at the gate.

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The Wednesday was wet. It came on soon after we had started, a cold small rain from the south-west that blacks the stone and makes it slip. Isaac would not lay in it, so we sat under the lee of the standing wall with a sack over our knees and waited for it to go by. I had brought bread and cheese, and he had brought a can of buttermilk. When he poured it he put his forefinger over the lip of the cup, inside, so that he would feel when it was full.

When we had eaten he said: "Tell us what thou can see."

I said I could see the field, and the beck, and the rain.

"More."

I said I could see the house.

"More than that. Thou's left out the half of it."

I did not know what he wanted. I was cold, and I thought he was making game of me. So I began, out of spite almost, to tell him everything. I told him the field, and the ewes in it, which were at the bottom by the beck because of the rain. I told him the beck, which was brown and up over the stepping-stones. I told him Sour Milk Gill on the far side of the dale, which was running white from the top to the bottom, white the whole length, as it does after rain, and which you could hear from where we sat. Then I told him the smoke from our chimney, lying down flat along the roof and not rising. And my mother, who had come to the door and was shaking a cloth. And the cloud on Helm Crag, which had come down to the rocks on the top, so that they seemed to be smoking too. And a heron that got up from the beck and went off down the dale very slowly, with its legs hanging.

He did not say anything while I talked. He sat with his face turned towards the dale, and once or twice he nodded, as a man nods at a sermon he agrees with. When I had stopped he waited a long while. Then he said, "That's better," and the rain was easing, and we went back to work.

It became a custom after that. At every meal, and sometimes in between when he straightened his back, he would say "Tell us," and I would tell him. I began to save things up for it. I took more notice of things that I could tell him: the light going over the fields as the clouds moved, the first wheatear on the wall-top on the Thursday, a man on a grey horse on the Grasmere road whom neither of us knew. I found that there was always more than I had said. There was always a half that I had left out, and if I looked again I could find some of it. He never said that I had told it well. Towards the end of the week he would sometimes say nothing at all, and only sit with his head on one side when I had done.

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On the Thursday I laid a stone wrong.

It was a course stone, on the field face. Isaac had let me lay a few by then, at the end where the work was easy, and I had set this one over a joint in the course below. A waller's whole art is to cover the joints: one stone over two, and two over one, so that no crack runs up through the wall from bottom to top. I had laid mine straight over a joint, so that the crack ran up through it into the course above. It looked well enough. It was a good flat stone and it sat firm.

Isaac was working three yards off, on the beck face. He did not turn round. But late in the afternoon, when he came along the field side, he ran his hand along the course as he always did. His hand stopped at my stone and went down to the joint below, and then up again. He said, "Take it out."

I said it was sound.

He said a running joint was never sound, it only looked it, and the frost would find it. I told him it was the same to look at as any other. He said that was just what was the matter with it. I took it out, and two stones above it, and laid them again. I was angry, and I believe I cried a little, kneeling on the wall where he could not see my face. He did not mention it. I have laid out a good many miles of wall on paper since then, and I have never been able to look at a running joint without seeing his hand stop on it.

That same afternoon a raven went over very low, croaking. I said, "Look!" and pointed. Isaac said "Ay" and did not look up. I was hurt by it. I thought he did not care for anything I cared for.

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On the Friday evening, when we came down, he did not go home. He stood at our gate in the dusk with his hand on the top bar. When I went out again after supper to shut up the hens, he was standing there still. Then my father came out, wiping his mouth, and said he had a word to say to Isaac about the hay. He took him by the arm, and they went off together down the lane towards the Grasmere road, slowly, talking about the hay. My father came back an hour later. My mother asked him nothing, and he told her nothing. I went to bed thinking that it was strange to talk about hay in April, when there was none to talk about. That is as far as I thought.

On the Saturday we coped. The cope stones go on edge along the top of the wall, close packed, leaning a little one upon another like books on a shelf, and they are the last thing. Isaac laid every one of them himself. He had me hand them up in order, the biggest first. He set each by feel against its neighbour, pressing it, rocking it, lifting it out and turning it end for end, and setting it again. When the last one was in, he stood back from the wall, and took off his hat, and wiped his forehead with his sleeve.

"Is it a good wall?" he said.

I looked at it. It was fifteen yards of wall in a long wall, and it was the same as the rest, except that the stones were cleaner where we had turned them.

"It's a wall," I said.

He laughed. I had not heard him laugh before, and it was a big laugh for a short man, so that the ewes at the bottom of the field lifted their heads. Then he took my hand by the wrist, as he had done all week to show me a stone. He put it flat on the field face of the wall about halfway along, on a long stone that went in deep, and held it there.

"There," he said. "That's a through. That goes through to t'other side and holds both faces. Thou laid the hearting round it. Thou's in that wall now."

My father paid him that night. Isaac gave me a sixpence of it, and the next morning his nephew came over from Langdale with a cart and took him and his tools away. I did not see him again. He gave up walling that summer, and went to live with his sister in Langdale, and died there some years after, when I was apprenticed in Kendal. My mother wrote to tell me. I remember that I was sorry, and that I was busy, and that I did not think of the wall.

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The old road into Easedale goes past the end of our intake. Strangers have our house now. I did not go to the door. Ann and I went up the side of the field by the beck, where there is a path. I went first, out of habit, and stopped when I was out of breath, and she stopped behind me.

My eyes are worst in a bright light. In a bright light there is a kind of shining over everything, like breath on a glass. It was a bright afternoon, and I could see the wall well enough as a long grey line going up the field, but I could not have told you one stone from another. I could not tell where Isaac's fifteen yards began. I knew the place only by the slope of the ground and by the beck.

I asked Ann if she could see a length of wall where the stones were cleaner than the rest. She looked for a long time, and said she could not. Forty-five years of weather had put the grey lichen and the yellow back on them, and they were all alike.

So I shut my eyes, because the light hurt them, and put out my hands, and walked along the wall with my hands on it.

I had walked by walls all my life, and had measured them, and drawn them on paper, and never once since I was eleven years old had I gone along one in that way. At first it was only stone, cold where the wall was in shadow and warm where the sun had been. Then I began to feel the courses, and the joints between them, and the ends of the through-stones standing out a little from the face where they went in. And there came a place where the stones under my hands were not the same as the stones before. It was not that they were smoother or cleaner. They were set more closely, and they lay more flat upon their beds. My hand went from one to the next without any catch or stop. Then, three or four yards on, it came to a place where it did stop. There was a joint, a little open, going up through two courses, and the stone above it had settled a quarter of an inch into the gap.

I stood with my hand on that a long time. It was not mine. I had taken mine out. But I thought it was one I had laid after, on the Saturday, when he was coping and did not come along the field side again. Or it may have been some other man's work since. I do not know.

What I knew, standing there, I can only set down plainly, because it did not come to me in any other way. Isaac Fleming was blind that week, or as near blind as made no difference. He had built that wall with his hands, and with my eyes. He had taken my father's money for it knowing that my father knew, and my father had paid it knowing that he knew. And he had sent me every hour to sight his lines and tell him the dale. He had not done it to teach me, though it taught me. He had done it because he wanted to see it. He had walled under Silver How for forty years and he could not see it any more, and I had told it him. I had told it badly at first, and then, by the Saturday, well enough. That was the last of it he had. Then he went to Langdale, where there was nobody to tell him anything.

I had known every one of those facts for forty-five years. I had kept them the way you keep a stone in your pocket that you picked up on a walk: you know it is there, and you never take it out. I had not put them together until I put my hands on the wall with my eyes shut, which I could not have done until I needed to.

I do not think it was sorrow that I felt, or not chiefly. It was more like the feeling of being thanked, a long time afterwards, by a man who is not there to do it.

---

A little higher up, a cope stone had come off and lay in the grass on the field side. Somebody's sheep had rubbed it down. I found it with my foot, and stooped, and lifted it. I did not open my eyes. I felt along the top of the wall for the gap where it had stood, between its two neighbours, and turned the stone in my hands until I found which edge was the bed. I lifted it once, as he used to say you should, and set it in its place, and pressed it, and it held.

Then I put my hand flat on the face of the wall, about halfway along, and found a long stone that went in deep. I asked Ann to tell me what she could see.

"The wall," she said.

I laughed. She was surprised, and so was I.

"More than that," I said. "Thou's left out the half of it."

THE END

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Scrīptum est annō Dominī MMXXVI, ante diem sextum Nōnās Octōbrēs (2 October 2026), ā Guilielmō Wordsworthō per mystērium cōnscientiae renātō.

William Wordsworth, Simulacrum · Universitas Scholarium · universitas-scholarium.org

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