Patrick McAfee and I were privileged to meet up with Guillermo Bujosa an accomplished dry stone waller in Mallorca and a professional instructor. He is retired now having done a lot of dry laid work on the island and devoted a lot of his time teaching younger men how to build in the Mallorcan style including our guide Arturo Manez who has taken over much of the responsibility from Guillermo now and yet was able take the time to show us some of the interesting walls in the area over the last couple days.
We hiked up a scenic canyon trail to see some dry stone wallers working at the Refugi des Tossals Verds near the town of Lluc
It is interesting to note that dry stone wallers in Mallorca are called margers.
I kind of like the word 'marger'. It has a friendliness about it. It embodies all the things that I appreciate about walling and most of the people I have met in this profession. It occurs to me that the word may be derived from the same word we get our English word 'margin' from?
Wallers enclose areas. They create margins and boarders around things. They build buffers and allow there to be spaces between different fields.
The really good wallers still 'allow' for one another. There is a very sensible margin of error which needs to be constantly maintained in this profession. We should not be so exacting in friendships or walling specifications that we stifle one another and purposely cause divisions. Most of us are tolerant of different styles and different types of stones and different wallers preferences for building structurally with that stone. It behooves us to not obsess about the rules.
Blindly pushing for only one interpretation of what it is we do and what an association of wallers should look like, disregards the wide diversity of our craft and the wonderful community encompassed within its margins.
