A Tribute to Laughton's Dry Stane Dykes

Shetland is an inspiring place, and you can't go far - in fact anywhere - without seeing a dry stane dyke, a type of wall building which uses the shapes and careful placing of stones to build a wall with no mortar.

My father-in-law Laughton is a dab hand at this ancient craft, and has just completed a large wall around his croft in Sandness. Building these types of walls takes a lot of time, involves lifting a huge number of stones and I imagine satisfying and laborious in equal measure. The results are stunning, and the patterns and pictures that the stones make in the walls can be mesmorising.

They use this technique to build little shelters for the sheep, which are also about as common a feature on the Shetland landscape as the stones which surround them.

I've never actually seen the sheep go inside, but it's nice to think that they can when the weather gets really bad, all warm and snuggled in a small space.

Having little arm muscles and even less spacial awareness I have not offered my services to the dry stane cause - my husband Jamie has always been keen to learn and during a recent visit Laughton set him loose on his first dry stane project - raising the height of the wall around the septic tank. Meanwhile Laughton worked on his wall going around the croft.

But unknown to Laughton (unless he peeked) I was completing my own little wall which I reckoned took about the same amount of patience and careful choices to produce the desired effect. This can't be called Blackwork, in fact it's the first time I've used colour. If you look carefully the stones are all different colours - there are greens, browns, blues, greys, pinks and whites. I got a range of threads that I thought might do the trick and used coloured pencil to shade in a photocopy of the sheep shelter picture to use as a guide.

Each stone was a different colour which made for quite a laborious sewing project but I think it was worth it, I made sure I did it on a small scale so I wouldn't lose my mojo half way through:

It took quite a while - I had a target of so many stones per day, gradually it built up to the complete wall, while they were building so was I:

It wasn't quite even at the top and the bottom, and I considered putting in some grass to cover up the wobbly lines, but I was more afraid of it being too 'chocolate box' so kept it simple. Then I cut a piece of felt for the roof and pinned it down with some stitching on either side - the following should be the finished article...... unfortunately Jamie hoovered it up by mistake - if trying this at home please skip this step!

I couldn't look, but luckily the stitching wasn't affected only the felt, so I'll be able to flatten it out and re-do the roof.....watch this space for the finished article...