White Island Walling
11 November 2007
By Martin Lawson
White Island lies a short way off the shore of Castle Archdale Country Park on lower Lough Erne, County Fermangh. People are attracted to the small 12th-century ruined church and even older carved stone figures on the island. Animals are ferried out each summer to graze the island and a rough drystone wall thrown up to protect the church and figures.
Recently the wall started to deteriorate and a number of partial collapses occurred. The wall, which is almost 1.5m high and over a metre wide in places, had become a danger to visitors.
EHS, who manage the island and historic monument, asked us to repair the wall. Martin Lawson, Fermanagh Projects Officer led a team of novice drystone walling volunteers to undertake this project.
EHS had agreed to ferry the group over but, on day one, storm force winds and rain lashed the lough. A decision was made to wait for better weather. It proved a good decision, as the following days were beautifully calm and the lough was like a mill pond.
For novice wallers, this was a tricky project. It would have been easier to strip the wall and start afresh. Unfortunately this would have taken too long. The group instead concentrated on rebuilding the collapsed sections and patch repairing and straightening the rest of the wall.
The outside faces of all the stones were very weathered and bleached white, while the interior faces of the stones were unweathered and still dark grey or brown. This meant all the stones had to be put back in the wall the correct way round. Similarly, the natural wiggles and undulations in the old wall had to be retained in the repaired sections otherwise the repaired sections would have stuck out like a sore thumb.
Despite the constraints, the group tackled the task with gusto and, over 3 days, 80 tons of stone was moved off and back onto the wall, voids in the middle filled with hearting, through stones added to tie the wall together and collapsed sections rebuilt. The finished result was a much safer and more stable wall.
The group was particularly proud of the fact that if you hadn’t seen the wall beforehand it was very difficult to tell they had done anything to it. As one group member said “We made a 50 year old wall look like a 200 year old one and its better.”
Between strenuous periods of heaving heavy rocks around, the group found plenty of time to sit in the glorious autumn sun and watch Lough Erne drift past whilst herons hunted along the shoreline and a pair of otters played in the reed beds. All the time the White Island figures looked on stoney faced.
| Relevant links |
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| Contact our Fermanagh office |
| External links |
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| White Island on Wikipedia |
| EHS |