Manual for the Inventory and Description of Stone Walls

Historic engraving of Groton Stone Walls in 1836.

Historic engraving of Groton, CT from Jonathan Warner Barber’s Connecticut Historic Collections (1836) showing the shoreline, a rock outcrop, complete deforestation, and rectangular pattern of stone walls. Such images provide a minimum age for stone walls that remain today.  In other words, they are older than 1836. 

I’ve just finished writing Version 1.1. of a  Manual for the Inventory and Description of Stone Walls. This emerged from a program I was offering during the spring of 2025 to town planners, land trusts,  historical societies, and garden clubs. The program had three parts: (1) a roundtable to discuss how to inventory stone walls and related features; (2) a training walk to demonstrate how to classify and describe these; and (3) a public lecture explaining why stone walls matter.  The results were so encouraging that I decided to share a working draft in writing that summarized what I had been sharing in presentations.

The manual is  accompanied by three Excel Spreadsheets that you can tweak for your purposes and use as options.

  • The published NOMENCLATURE used to describe walls and related features. This lists and briefly defines all terms in a  compact form.
  • The published classification system or TAXONOMY used to decide what kind of wall you’re describing, and
  • The INVENTORY I’ve developed to standardize and speed up wall classification and description (Select Sheet 1 for Walls, and Sheet 2 for related Features).

As it says in the manual, please feel free to send me comments and corrections.  Good luck!