An academic, Curtis Fields bought a farm with many tumble down walls in New England in 1938. He began to rebuild these walls and wrote this "illustrated guide" to wall construction shortly before his death, aged 85.

In many ways I found this a strange book. It is short and at times the text is basic, but it has some useful information on stone moving and splitting. The authors skills here were honed by acquiring and manoeuvring the massive flat slab coping to the walls. This information has been used wholesale by Brooks in "Dry Stone Walling". There is some quirky advice, such as "when working with dynamite to dislodge partially hidden stones, seek expert advice". Eventually an anecdote is attached to this advice.

Much of the book is like this attaching anecdotes to technical advice, with the anecdote frequently the only explanation. The technical information sections which are too basic and general, the "Rebuilding old walls" section adds nothing to the book and is essentially a waste of space. The technical information is very much written by an amateur with limited experience or range. Some of the advice is confusing, some possibly misleading, the anecdotal techniques are interesting but of limited use. Then again there was one gem of an insight into the need for setting stones level given the extremes in climate in New England. There are also some interesting if not entirely convincing ideas about drainage.

This book would probably be of some interest to devotees of the craft, but is likely to be of limited use to the beginner. Most of its useful information is contained in Brooks et al., if it wasn`t for this book such information might not have been included by others, but that alone cannot be reason for acquiring it, unless you are desperate to find his reasoning behind setting stones flat!

Had this book been more technical or more anecdotal it would have been far more worthy, as it is it seems to get caught between two stalls and as such it fails in its claims to be "an illustrated guide to dry stone walling", but I enjoyed it anyway!