Stone Home Ruins

Stone Home Ruins is a collapsed stone house on the slope of a paddock somewhere in the Snowy Monaro region. The walls are still standing in part: two of the four are mostly intact, while the other two have come down completely. The stone is local rough-cut basalt or granite, originally laid in mortared courses but now held together more by weight than mortar. Inside, the floor is overgrown with grass. A doorway frame stands without a door. The corner where two walls meet has the cleanest geometry; the rest of the structure is partial. A few stones from the fallen walls have ended up in a pile beside the entrance.

Stone houses across the Monaro were often built by hand by the original settlers, using local rock split on site. They were built to outlast the people who built them. Most have. The ruins in this photograph are typical of what is left of mid-nineteenth-century settler housing across this part of the country: walls reduced to half-height, roofs gone, interiors taken back by the paddock. The pace of collapse is slow. Stone weathers; mortar fails; in a hundred years a wall may lose half its height. The wall in this photograph is in the middle of that timeline.