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Sunday 14th October 2018

5799/18819

A lot of people thought I was crazy when I said I  was getting into stone clearing. “Oh sure,” they said, “Everyone loves moving stones off a field when the weather is nice, but when it starts to rain and snow, that will sort the amateur from the professionals.” 
Which shows how much they know. Even the most experienced stone clearer is not interested in payment, at least not in money. Their payment is a cleared field, a six foot dry stone wall around it and the guarantee that their name will live forever in legend plus possible deification.
We are a simple folk.
They thought I was a fair-weather stone-clearer.

Today it was raining as I took Wolfie for her long walk and sure the mud can slow down your progress,
But stone-clearers don't don’t mind a bit of mud. We do mind a lot of stones. And we mind mud in the other sense of the word “mind”. In that we look after it, by removing stones from it….That’s actually the motto of the Federation of Stone Clearers. All of that paragraph. It hardly fits on the coat of arms.

We don’t mind getting our hands dirty. It would be crazy if we did. That’s essentially the main thing that happens in the job. That’s the motto of the Guild of Stone Clearers. 
There are two competing organisations with slightly different mottos and a fierce hatred of each other. I have yet to choose which side I will be on in this war. I work independently. Like a maverick.

Rain isn’t a deterrent to the stone-clearer. It’s actually a positive boon When the ground is hard and dry, the stones are caked into the earth and the bigger ones can be harder to retrieve. But when the field becomes mud, and if you don’t mind getting your hands dirty (see above) you can easily dig and pull out almost any stone. Plus of course the rain washes the mud away and reveals more stones. In a sense it feels like the rain causes the stones to grow and to be harvested. It doesn’t though. Over many centuries it actually diminishes the stones.
But stone clearers bless the stone god for sending the rain, even if it makes our work more back-breaking. Back pain is a passing thing, like human life. The stones have been here for eons and will be here until they are consumed by the fire God at the end of time.



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