Step into the woods above Hant’s Harbour, and you’ll find something out of a fairytale: a maze of moss-covered stone walls stretching off into the trees.
The largest section is a metre high, almost two metres wide, and over 20 metres long, and, though the local nickname “The Great Wall” may be tongue-in-cheek, it does reflect the intensive labour that must have gone into building these structures.
“The Great Wall really has a bit of an air of speculation and mystery about it that I think really gets people’s imaginations going,” said Marlayne Hardy, chair of the Willow Tree Heritage Society, a group that aims to preserve the history of Hant’s Harbour.
The Great Wall is one of the sights on the society’s new audio walking tour of the area, but it’s been a favourite local landmark for years.
“When I have people that come to visit Hant’s Harbour,” said Hardy, “the Great Wall is one of the walks that we do because I want them to see it. It’s one of the highlights.”
The question is: who built the wall, and why?
Though it’s survived centuries, the wall wasn’t secured with mortar.
Some sections were built over natural features of the landscape that were bolstered with stones using a technique called nogging. Others were assembled in a rubble pattern, with larger rocks laid first and pebbles inserted into the gaps between them for stability.
This second construction method allows stones to shift independently of one another so a structure can better withstand the movements caused by settling and the freeze-thaw cycle. Water can drain through the openings in the wall, and individual stones can fall out without setting off a progressive collapse.
Some of the boulders used in the Great Wall are so large they couldn’t have been carried, and the site suggests either generations of effort or strenuous work by a large group of people.
The origin of the wall has been a subject of local debate for years.
Some speculate that it may have been built as a caribou fence by pre-contact Indigenous people or that it was part of a hideaway for pirates like Peter Easton and his crew, who really did build a fort at Harbour Grace on the opposite side of the Bay de Verde Peninsula around 1612.
A report submitted to the Provincial Archaeology Office by Gerald Penney Associates in 2014, though, determined that the wall is more recent. Their investigation of the site uncovered ceramic sherds and a fragment of a green glass bottle dating to the mid-1800s.
At that time, Hant’s Harbour was a prosperous fishing port and a trade centre for nearby communities on the eastern shore of Trinity Bay.
Newfoundland fishing families relied on subsistence farming to supplement their diet, but the region’s rocky hillsides would have been challenging to cultivate.
Parts of the Great Wall might have been retaining barriers, intended to shore up the land into terraces for gardening. Or they could have been field walls, created from stones that were rooted out to ready the soil for planting and dumped at the edge of the clearing.
That the Great Wall runs so close to a hiking trail suggests a third possibility.
This coastal path follows an old road that once connected communities along the shore.
Parts of the trail are still paved with flat stones that were probably meant to keep carts from getting bogged down in mud.
In the late 1820s, during an economic slump caused by the Napoleonic wars, the colonial government began to invest in road upgrades in rural areas. These projects were intended to encourage agriculture by giving farmers better access to land, supplies and markets.
Footpaths were expanded to bridle paths wide enough for a horse and rider, then to roads broad enough for a wagon.
Two men from Hant’s Harbour requested money from the government in 1840 to complete a road between Hant’s Harbour and Seal Cove (now New Chelsea) about three-and-a-half kilometres to its northeast.
Teams of men would have been hired for this construction work, and they could have built the Great Wall from stones they cleared to smooth the roadway. Using wheeled carts, groups of three to four people would have been able to move even the larger boulders found in the structure today.
More mounds to mull
The Great Wall isn’t the only mysterious monument on the eastern shore of Trinity Bay.
Other mounds and platforms of rock are clustered along the old road northeast of Hant’s Harbour.
Where their purpose can be identified, the Gerald Penney Associates report concludes they were associated with 19-century agriculture, fishing and roadwork.
The Willow Tree Walk self-guided tour is intended to transport visitors back to those early days of settlement in the region. At each stop, including the Great Wall, visitors can listen to a story inspired by local history and read by a Hant’s Harbour resident, from Mayor Korri Power to actor Andy Jones.
The audio tour and map can be downloaded here.
“When you walk through, you think, what was life like in the mid-nineteenth century?” said Hardy. “What was that like for people trying to garden and trying to farm?”
An overgrown wall in the shadowy woods is bound to spark the imagination, but, in this case, the reality may be just as thought-provoking as the fantasy.
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