The Walling Week

You come for a week to the Alentejo countryside. You stay in a quiet house on a hill, eat well, sleep well, and spend your days building dry stone walls with Steven, who has spent his life working with stone.

By the end of the week there is a length of wall on the land that was not there before. You built it, and it will still be standing long after all of us.

Who it is for

Everyone. Some people arrive never having held a walling hammer. Some build walls for a living and want to work a new stone, in a new landscape, with someone who has been doing it for decades.

The group is small, so Steven can teach each person at their own level. If you are new, you start with the basics and go at your own pace.

If you already build in stone, you take on the harder pieces: wall heads, curves, pillars and steps. You also work a stone you may not know. The schist of the Alentejo is flat and layered and splits along its beds, and it lays very differently from granite or limestone. Steven learned his trade in Scottish conservation work, and he is glad to talk about how he works with anyone who is interested.

How the week goes

The first morning is not spent building. You dig, you sort stone into heaps by what it is good for, and you learn to look at a stone and see its face before you pick it up. It can feel slow. Steven teaches it first because the rest of the week depends on it.

From the first afternoon you are on the wall. You build slowly, and some of it comes down again, because the fastest way to learn what a bad course looks like is to build one and be shown why it will not last. Nobody shouts. The stone does that job well enough on its own.

By the fourth day the group has found its rhythm and the wall moves quickly. The last day is for copes and clearing up, and then everyone stands and looks at it for longer than is strictly necessary, which is traditional.

Not only work

Work starts early and finishes after lunch, before the afternoon heat. The rest of the day is yours: the pool, a walk on the Rota Vicentina, a swim in the lake, a long sleep, or dinner in the village. You may come for the walls and find that the slow pace of the countryside matters just as much. It does for us.

What it asks of you

This is real physical work outdoors. You lift stone, your hands will be sore by the second day, and you will sleep very well. You do not need to be strong, because technique moves more stone than muscle, but you do need to be on your feet outside for most of the morning.

If you have a bad back or any injury, please tell us before you book. There is plenty of useful work at bench height and we would rather plan for it.