One of the most obvious, dominant features of the Yorkshire Dales is the dry stone wall. Built without mortar and stable because of their unique construction there are over 5,000 miles of dry stone walls in the Dales alone. In fact someone with too much time on their hands during covid, measured every dry stone wall in the Yorkshire Dales National Park and came up with the fact that if you laid them all end on end that they would reach half way to Australia!
As I guide my visitors around the Yorkshire Dales, the miles of walls are always a topic of conversation and I like to provide a bit of insight into their history and how they came into being. The purpose of the building of walls is simple, they are there usually to mark a physical boundary, usually to limit movement of domestic (or wild) animals.
The first question I get asked is how old they are. This is an interesting question without a definitive answer. Most dry stone walls in the Yorkshire Dales date to the late 1700’s and early 1800’s at a time which dates to the Enclosure movement, but more on that later.
The oldest walls actually date to the bronze age about 2500 BC, the oldest examples in the Yorkshire Dales being located at Burban Moor in Lower Wensleydale. There are 14 enclosures approximately 50 x 40m as well as some circular stone huts, so the technology behind their construction isn’t exactly brand new!
You can use the style of the construction of a dry stone wall to take a good guess at its age. There was a style which was prevalent during monastic times between the Norman conquest and the late 1500’s, where walls were built with one side straight and the other with a continuous overhang along the top on one side. This was actually to protect sheep from wolves – fortunately no longer a problem in the Dales!
Most of these walls now need a bit of repair but are still standing. If you have even been up onto Malham Cove and walked along the walled dry valley above it called Watlows Valley that is a good example. Back during monastic times this was the boundary between lands owned by Bolton Priory and Fountains Abbey.
Other examples of walling from this period include the many Drovers Roads across the fells such as Mastilles Lane. As well as giving their name to the Drovers Arms made famous in the James Herriot books, these walled lanes were used for driving livestock to and from winter and summer pasture or to transport animals market.
Interestingly it wasn’t just sheep or cows. Geese from the Dales would be taken to the annual Goose Fayre in Nottingham along these green lanes. Before their journey they were driven through a shallow bath of warm tar, then a bed of tiny grit to cat their feet for the long waddle! Many old Smithies in the Dales still retain an old stone tar bath.
The later walls date to the time of various enclosures acts. This was where between the late 1700s and 1800s agricultural practices changed. The open field system where common land existed which the Lord of the Manor let his farmers use for grazing was taken away from the people by the wealthy land owners and tenant farmers were displaced from lands their families had helped farm for centuries .
These walls tend to be very straight and use a more “modern construction”.
The walls construction tends to mirror the design below. The wall consists of two skins, with larger stones known as the footings at the base as a foundation course. The two side as gradually built up tapering them gradually inwards. To give the walls extra stability, the cavity is infilled with smaller stones – known as infill or heartings.
The two sides of the wall are locked in place by a Coping stone or Top stone, sometimes known as a Cam. Further stability during construction comes from adding Through stones or Throughs – which are longer stones which pass through both sides of the wall skin. Different wallers use different amounts of throughs, some at random and some as part of the design. Also some wallers us a flat stone on top of the two faces or skins when they meet before adding the coping stone.
The dry stone walls all tend to be 1.6m high (based on an old measurement of 7 quarters) this is before the coping stone. The walls taper from 0.75, at the base to 0.4m at the top.
A question I often get asked too is how long did it take to build all the walls in the Dales. Well, Rome was certainly not built in a day. Nowadays, there are less and less people with dry stone walling skills, so back in the 1700 and 1800’s there were more people able to wall as demand was high and pay by the landowners good. Most of the walls you see driving around were built over a period of 100 years.
A good drystone waller can build 6-7 metres of wall a day. They would be experienced enough to build by eye and it is said a good waller would “never pick the same stone up twice”. Every metre of wall uses about two tonnes of stone, so lifting this by hand the waller has to be pretty fit.
There are a few features which can still be seen now in dry stone walls including Cripple holes or Smouts, small holes which sheep could use to pass between field at times of drought or to seek lower pasture during snows. At Fountains Abbey you can see Bee Boles built into walls, small recessed cavities to house bee hives.
Up above Swinithwaite in Wensleydale, a couple of years ago I was shown dry stone walls built by French soldiers who had been taken prisoner of war during the Napoleonic Wars, so there is far more to the humble stone walls that originally meets the eye.
These walls were on land which is part of the Swinithwaite Estate, where they run a great little enterprise called the Wensleydale Experience, where you can take a farm experience or even try out a spot of dry stone walling first hand. I took a group there a couple of years back and after a short training session by Tim Durham, they were let loose. It was amazing how much they got into it, seeing the section of broken wall they were working on come back to life. At the end of the hour we had put aside for this activity and with the wall still unfinished it was very difficult to prize the group away!
There is lots more information about dry stone walls if you are interested. A good starting point is the Dry Stone Walling Association website - https://www.dswa.org.uk
There is also a great display at Shibden Hall in Halifax as well as demonstrations at many of the Agricultural Shows held in the Dales over the summer months. But I hope you now have the basics and I have whet your whistle as to some of the background behind these iconic Yorkshire structures.
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