Excerpts from book by David B. Williams

Cairns mark territorial boundaries, good hunting grounds, places of danger, burial spots of dead relatives, territories of historical significance, sites to appease a deity, and locations to seek good luck.

Federal regulation prohibit the disturbance of rock in national parks.

Cairns can be seen as one of the earliest forms of communication.

One of the basic facts of water-rounded rocks: the only shape you can build with them is a pyramid.

Book: Stone by Stone: The Magnificent History in New England’s Stone Walls

Commemorative piles of stone occur around the world. The literature mentions trailside shrines, memorial heaps, luck heaps, sacrifice rocks, liar’s mounds, rock mounds, rock piles, wishing piles, wayside altars, post offices, and taverns.

“Above all, stone is. Stone transcends the precariousness of humanity. Men have always adored stones simply in as much as they represent something other than themselves.” –Mircea Eliade

Unlike animate objects, stone has no personal history. It has no feelings or sentiments. It does not change. It just is, and thus we find it easy to ascribe a stone with a value, to make it sacred, to give it the capacity to possess a trait that can help or hinder. And by adding our stone to others, we reaffirm and get confirmation of this belief.

Beginning in the late 1800s, a lone monk, Yi Gap Yong, spent three decades assembling more than one hundred stone towers. He reportedly collected the stones specifically from rivers and stacked them according to Taoist concepts of reality. About eighty remain and consist of either a single column of stones or a conical mound topped by a stone column. (Tapsa Temple complex in South Korea )

To find the right energy within the stones means slowing down and concentrating. Balancing stones has a calming effect. It is meditative. It centers. It brings peace. As one practitioner wrote, “One cannot make the rocks balance by being assertive, powerful, controlling, manipulative, manipulative, threatening, yelling, or any other form of intimidation. The rock is obviously completely unaffected by any of this.”

From popular tourist map: “The stones you see stacked along the road are done by visitors who believe there is some significance. There is none.”

To many, erecting personal cairns, whether to mark a route or for some more philosophical reason, is the equivalent of graffiti — an unneeded, self-indulgent blight on the natural landscape.

One of the things I like best about cairns is that people make them from found rocks and not from rocks cut, chiseled, or sawn for that purpose.