I have been stonewalling since I was eleven years old.

In my childhood, I erected psychological stonewalls between the innocent child within me from the hateful people that surrounded me. These walls were consciously built by me knowing exactly what I was doing. They were just like the second ones mentioned below, in that at the beginning, I was not very good at it. Unfortunately for me, the wall I built before my first stress* breakdown was in no way strong enough to keep me hidden and safe.

I learnt from experience to build my inner walls stronger. The second kind of stonewalls are those I have built as a professional dry stone waller based mainly in the Lake District, but also in the northern counties of England and the Highlands and Islands of Scotland. It was the building of these walls, that brought me peace of mind when my depressions laid me so low that I considered suicide.           

The third type of wall is the kind I didn’t totally discover until 2016. These were the unconscious stonewalls my brain erected in my mind to hide from me the truth of the trauma I was subjected to in a mental hospital in 1972. These walls kept everything hidden until my brain deemed it safe to release the truth.         

It was only in when I was in my early sixties that, as this third type of wall disintegrated, stone by stone at first, then in a tumult, that I discovered what my brain had been hiding from me. 

I live to build walls, I do not build walls to live.

* see glossary