Stone walls in Ireland

Traveling through rural Ireland from east to west immediately apparent hundreds of miles of stone walls, wandering over farmland in all directions. These stone walls are perfectly normal pattern for the Irish population, but tourists are always a lot of questions.

Ireland - mostly rocky island composed of limestone Carboniferous age about 370 million years. At that time, Ireland was part of the shallow sea between the two land masses near the equator. The change raised the continents of the seabed above sea level, and for hundreds of millions of years the rocks were covered with soil.

It is this limestone has become the most widely used building material for the Irish population. From Stone Age graves, to fortresses, castles and monasteries of the Middle Ages, these stones everywhere. Common throughout the stone walls are not a mystery. For the cultivation of the land and farming the soil should be cleared of stones, and since there is no place to dispose of them, the farmers decided to just put them out of the wall on the boundaries of their plots.