What rubble wall builders put up, picnickers take down

The next time you're tempted to pull stones off a rubble wall think twice, as building a wall that holds together without cement is a painstaking job that takes days to complete.

So say Pawlu Sammut, Alfred Sciortino and Karmnu Farrugia, rubble wall builders from the Parks, Afforestation and Countryside Restoration Department (Park) within the Environment Ministry, who expressed exasperation at how the dry-stone walls they restore are persistently taken apart.

It's their Monday morning blues, they said as we walked through the paths of Buskett last week, to find "the disaster" left by picnickers over the weekend. After years of abandon, rubble walls broken by years of rainwater and vandalism are gradually being rebuilt across the islands. "Come the weekend, and the walls are destroyed again, especially in popular areas," Mr Sammut, the most fiery character of the three, said.

The workers say the walls are destroyed by vandals or playfully by children. Sometimes, the stones are even stolen to be sold illegally. A pile of stones, which the workers had lifted out of an old water reservoir to reuse for the rubble walls, was thrown back into the reservoir, they pointed out.

"There is no respect for beauty and nature. Why should you destroy to have fun?" asked Mr Sciortino, who has been building rubble walls since very young.

The workers said the problem is a lack of education, explaining that if people appreciated the work that goes into building dry-stone walls, they would be more careful.

Building rubble walls the old way, they explained, is not straightforward. "Stones of irregular shapes need to layered and tightened by smaller stones, which we call maskan, that are hammered into the spaces to lock the courses," the workers said.

Building rubble walls, a skill that was on the decline, started being revived in 2004 when a course on the traditional technique was started by the Building Industry Consultative Council, Fondazzjoni Wirt Artna, Limestone Heritage and the Architecture Students Association (SACES) at the university.

Besides assigning its own workers to the restoring of rubble walls, the government had applied for €850,000 of the EU's pre-accession funds for rubble wall restoration schemes and wind shields to encourage farmers to rebuild broken walls.