Friday, April 29, 2011

Safety In Numbers




I am sure there are not enough dry stone walls in Canada. We need to see lots more of them being built. The DSWAC is committed to seeing this happen.

Some people think that they are too likely to get vandalized and so we shouldn't be trying to build them all over the place. I say the more there are, the less likely they'll be fodder for defacing or being purposely damaged.

Take the photo above for example. It looks like this telephone booth in Grasmere in the Lake District of England has been vandalized quite a few times but the walls next to it (and all around it ) haven't been damaged at all and look just fine.

There are only 15,000 red kiosk telephone booths in Britain, and there are more than 180,000 miles of dry stone walls in the UK ( sure lots of these walls are in bad repair but this is due to 'low maintenance' - they last, even when people neglect to maintain them at all!)

Anyway, I'm guessing that because walls are much more common in Britain, they are less enticing than the kiosks to bother trying to wreck, plus the phone booths are made of things that take spray paint better and are made of manufactured parts that are easy to break. The booths will always be much more expensive/difficult to repair.

Vandals like to think that their efforts are not going to go wasted on something that people can just come along and fix the next day.

Let's get out there and work towards more Dry Stone Walling Across Canada and soon we'll see our walls begin to outnumber the ugly concrete ones that people have to look at everyday, leaving them even more vulnerable to the vandal's critical eye.