Thacher students give Wakefield stonewalls a “style”

A team of students from Thacher Montesorri’s Adolescent Program have just completed construction of the estate’s first stile (also spelled style). A stile is defined as a set of steps for passing over a fence or wall, and is more commonly seen in the United Kingdom. Here at the estate, stiles will be valuable to keep people from climbing over and damaging our historic dry-laid stonewalls. We estimate that some walls on the property are as much as 300 years old and are built with stones sometimes weighing several hundred pounds.

After researching stiles, the students worked with Wakefield Groundskeeper Dave Cafaro to design and construct a stile near the chicken coop. Visitors are often tempted to climb over the wall to get closer to the chickens and this stile effectively provides a means to climb over the wall without risking injury to the visitor or the wall. It also provides access to a new “learning circle” that a larger group of Thacher AP students built earlier this fall. Hopefully Dave and the students will have the opportunity to build a couple more stiles for other locations on the property.