Dry stone wall repairs help to preserve heritage and farming enterprises

The work has been made possible through the trust’s Wild Ingleborough programme.

Dry stone walls are also a vastly underestimated habitat for wildlife; mice, shrews, stoats and voles often take up residence, alongside hundreds of invertebrates, nesting birds and owls.

Dwayne Martindale, Wild Ingleborough Programme Assistant, said: “Each stone must be inspected and painstakingly placed in the right location to ensure these walls last as long as possible. As a result it can take days to restore 10 metres of dry stone wall – so to have restored 400m is a real achievement that we and our incredible volunteers are very proud of.”

Restoring two metres of dry stone wall can cost the trust up to £150 in staff time, volunteer training, transport and the occasional need to bring stone in from external spaces.

Dwayne added: “Preserving the integrity of style and character while maintaining the structural integrity of dry stone walls is an effort that is ongoing - the scale of the work involved to keep on top of all the walls in the Dales is huge. Alongside the occasional cow knocking into them, our dry stone walls face damage by the elements due to erosion of land, frost, storms and flooding – and vandalism is also a problem, particularly on popular rambling routes where visitors are often tempted to take a short cut over a wall.

“We are immensely grateful for the hard work and effort of our local volunteers, many of whom are out in all weathers to help us maintain Ingleborough’s landscape. We are deeply thankful for the help and support of the local community, many of whom have been kind enough to pass along skills vital for our work. And finally – none of our work would be possible without our members and the generous supporters who have donated to our ongoing Wild Ingleborough appeal.”

Wild Ingleborough is a landscape-scale restoration programme based around the mountain, which seeks to restore and protect Ingleborough’s nationally-important limestone grasslands and limestone pavements, and the unique flowers and plants found there – a third of all UK species.

Ingleborough is the only place in the world that the tiny white stars of Yorkshire sandwort are found, just one of four places in the UK you can see Teesdale violets, and one of just two places in Yorkshire where purple saxifrage grows. Its limestone pavements are so unusual that they host rare holly ferns, lichens and mosses, as well as patches of sweet-smelling wild thyme and rock-rose, the main food source of the rare northern brown argus butterfly.

Over the next year, the trust will continue its restoration and maintenance of the area’s dry stone walls as well as ongoing work nurturing rare wildflowers and plants in the programme’s upland plant nursery.