Stonewall

We have more than 1,000 metres of dry stone walls around the farm.

Walling is an old skill used to divide land into more manageable parcels for grazing and separation of ownership. No part of the wall uses cement or lime mortar and only weight/friction binds the wall together. That is more remarkable when the size of the walls is considered.

Along our boundary with the moor estate the wall is nearly two metres high, not including the foundation buried below the surface. I always admire the effort it took to construct it, considering that it is likely to date from 200 years ago and is 250 metres above sea level and over half a kilometre from the nearest road. 

Some of the base courses, or layers, resemble boulders not the key elements of a field boundary. Another of our walls has a number of these large stones and is classified as historic under the terms of the farm Entry Level Stewardship (ELS) subsidy scheme. The walls were originally constructed by local farmers who would share the work, working on each others farms to gather stone laying on the ground and lay the patchwork patterns we have today.

Over time many of walls have fallen into disrepair and no longer constitute viable livestock controls. In one memorable case a neighbours bull decided one length stood in between it and goodness knows what and left a sizeable hole; we were told that had the wall been better maintained it would have 'turned' the bull, but I'm not so sure... We call him Burgers, but that's a different story.

Our subsidy will help us hire a contractor to fix major sections of wall and we've already started to repair stretches where the top stones are missing. Under a separate scheme the National Park offer a grant to part fund repair works alongside roads and footpaths on the Moors. At the beginning of the year we applied for five walls to be considered, and eventually heard that we had successfully received funding for the most complex length.

There are three contractors available in Farndale; Dave Bentley is a sheep farmer, but also a Master Waller and we'd been told by a number of people that he was the guy to help us. The challenge for Dave included a collapsed retaining wall, with a badly damaged stock wall on top of that. To kick start the project we removed the nettle, thistle and bramble (finding three rolls of rusty wire fence in the process) barrier and dug away the worst part of the collapse.

The pictures show the area of the collapse with the stone removed and then the retaining wall built, with a stagger, leaning into the field behind it. The wall will be built on top. It's quite an art. Picking the correct, heavy, stone and placing it, well it's worth watching. It's said an experienced waller 'never picks up the same stone twice', or in other words once he picks up the stone he knows it's the right one for that part of the wall he's building.