These Dry Stone Walls

歌詞

These miles of dry stone walls That hold, in ploughed brown fields, these kingly halls The dead of centuries in hills of sand The stones that bind them Are proud as what lies behind them And varied as the counties in this curious land In Cumberland they built them On hills that surely must have killed them Through broom and juniper and stunted ling Two thousand feet over With just a tarpaulin cover They crouched in wind and rain and waited for the spring In Aberdeenshire valley The fields were only open quarry The stones were gathered up and made to stand But with every ploughing You'd think it was stones they'd been sowing The walls grew sadder here than any in the land The Irish built in courses Of single stones the size of horses Of glacial boulders, without edge or face But if you could view them above The sun lighting through them You'd swear the hills were edged in broken granite rays When Pict and Viking took Stone pages from some prehistoric book A sandy flagstone under Orkney hills Hailing there the while And left history in the islands This is what water, wind and time and toil reveal From Yorkshire's limestone hills Through Derbyshire to the coast of Wales From Shetland's salty rocks to Devon lane Just look and discover Two walls that lean against each other You'll never see them in quite the same way again These miles of dry stone walls That hold, in ploughed brown fields, these kingly halls The dead of centuries in hills of sand The stones that bind them Are proud as what lies behind them And varied as the counties in this curious