The Rock Walls (fences) of Ireland…..

Pretty much everywhere I ride here, I see fences made out of rocks.
While many mark off the feeding ground for livestock, an even larger percentage of them frame the roads along which I ride.

Up close, many of them look like this

Oftentimes the hedges lining both sides of many roads, are really rock fences…

A bit of Google research, indicates that there are 250,000 miles of rock fences (they call them walls) here in Ireland (4 times the 63,000 road miles here in Ireland,  source). While there is evidence that there were rock fences here as far back as 3800 BC, most were built after the Great Famine of 1840 when the open system of farming was replaced by land redistribution.