Thanks for the explanation. The nobleman was a landowner, like Levin in Tolstoi's Anna Karenina. And the wall of the inner garden of the house I was describing is/was made of stone, but I think in Russian villages you tend not to use stone so much (the word for wood and village have the same root in Russian, for example). The simple word, аристократ, rather than староста should do for nobleman. There is more I would like to say, but I am about to leave the house. It is night here and the sky is cloudy, not starry.