"In Plato’s Republic the ancient Greek philosopher imagines a cave whose dwellers have never seen the world except as fuzzy shadows cast by objects outside. An inmate ventures out and amazed at the true forms of things, struggles to explain to his benighted friends. I, too, will struggle to describe to you the wall that a farmer-friend’s son, now a professional dry stone waller, has built at the bottom of our garden. Alex Frost has made a wall of which all other walls are just pale shadows — and done it from irregular lumps of dense, flinty rock, turning chaos into order.

This, surely the winning entry in any competition for Top Wall of 2025, has become an object of worship for me as I pull back my bedroom curtains every morning. You, reader, in your cave, have only seen imperfect shadows of dry stone walls. I have now seen the real thing."