Country & Coast: French reminder of special features of Dales landscape

I had know idea how much I took drystone walls for granted before showing some French friends around the Yorkshire Dales. There are none where they live on the north side of Paris and they would have to travel 500 miles south to Provence to find them on home soil.
Sunlight highlights a myriad of stone barns and drystone walls in Upper Swaledale.  Picture: Gary Longbottom.Sunlight highlights a myriad of stone barns and drystone walls in Upper Swaledale.  Picture: Gary Longbottom.
Sunlight highlights a myriad of stone barns and drystone walls in Upper Swaledale. Picture: Gary Longbottom.

My visitors could not stop gasping “magnifique” and “superbe”, and seeing them through their eyes for a change they were absolutely right.

In the July sun, grids of limestone lines gleamed across every emerald dale bottom and hillside as we drove up Wharfedale and climbed over Kidstones Pass to reach Bishopdale and Wensleydale, and suddenly it seemed impossible to imagine the landscape without these iconic structures.

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They look different in other parts of Yorkshire. In the Pennines the walls are darker coloured because of the gritstone, and different again over in the North York Moors where sandstone is the main underlying geology.

Overall, it is estimated that there are 180,000 miles of drytsone walls in the UK, and someone calculated that 5,000 miles of these are in the Yorkshire Dales alone. That’s the distance from Skipton to Las Vegas.

The North Craven Historical Research Group has been investigating the history of drystone walls and concluded that while many in the Dales were constructed after the Enclosure Acts which began in 1604, some are clearly much older.

Much of the stone was probably assembled from the fields they were built around, and the general height was “seven quarter yards” or 63 inches, although the great Enclosure Act of 1793 stipulated a height of six feet. In Craven at least, this specification does not appear to have been met according to the Research Group.

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The walls are mainly a feature of upland landscapes because more exposed stone was available there. One feature they all share, of course, is that they are not held together by cement or mortar. What keeps them from falling down is the skill of the wallers, who are the ultimate jigsaw compilers. They can instinctively spot stones which fit together in such a way that the wall will stand the test of mountain gales and - as we know - also last for centuries.

Some years ago I had a crack at building part of a wall at a Yorkshire country fair, but the yard of wall that took me more than an hour to painstakingly build collapsed within a few minutes. Professional wallers - sadly an endangered species - can take an entire day to construct just ten feet of wall.

Appealing as they are to the eye, the walls have another value that is overlooked. In the sparse uplands, where they tend to provide the only shelter from the elements, they can host a fair amount of wildlife. The walls have become a microhabitat for all kinds of birds, small mammals, insects and plants. In Arkengarthdale on the northern edge of the Yorkshire Dales I once found in crevices the nests of a robin, a wren and blue tit in the space of an hour.

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