Yorkshire Dry-Stone Walls: Building the Boundaries of the Dales

Look across almost any valley in the Yorkshire Dales and the first thing you notice is the net of grey walls laid over the green: tight, crooked enclosures around the villages, then larger fields on the lower slopes, then long straight lines marching up the fellsides and over the skyline. The Yorkshire Dales National Park Authority calls its dry-stone walls the most extensive man-made feature in the National Park, more than 8,600 kilometres of them, or some 5,000 miles. Each wall was built by hand without mortar, and together they record centuries of farming, enclosure and labour. Yorkshire’s dry-stone walls are best understood not as scenery but as a historical document, and they are one of the highlights of the northern days of our small group tour of England’s villages.

Stone, terrain and boundary making

Dales walls are built of whatever lay underfoot, and the stone changes with the rock. In the limestone country of Craven, around Settle, the walls are a clean grey-white, matching the white crags and scars above them. Where sandstone and gritstone take over, they turn sooty grey or dark brown. In Wensleydale, where layers of grit and limestone alternate, walls climbing the upper slopes can change from dark to light to dark again as they cross each band of rock. The Conservation Volunteers’ walling handbook describes these regional differences in detail.

Where the stone came from also tells you about the wall’s age. The Park Authority’s appraisal of the Swaledale and Arkengarthdale barns and walls notes that earlier walls were built from stone gathered off the surrounding land, while many walls of around 1750 to 1850 were built from small quarries dug right beside them. Very large boulders or upright slabs at the base often indicate an early wall. A Royal Geographical Society walk near Settle points out another clue: soil built up on the uphill side of a wall is a sign that it has stood there a long time.

How old are the Dales’ dry-stone walls?

They range from medieval, or even earlier, to the early nineteenth century, and the shape of a wall is often the best clue to its age. The historian Arthur Raistrick, in his classic study of Pennine walls, identified three broad groups: irregular, crooked walls around farms and villages; more rectangular fields on the valley floors and lower slopes; and long, straight walls running up the high fellsides. Later research, such as David Johnson’s survey of the walls of Conistone in Upper Wharfedale, has shown that Raistrick’s dates were too tidy and that many irregular walls are much older than he thought. But his broad sequence, from crooked to straight, still helps the eye.

The oldest boundaries can be very old indeed. The Park Authority’s appraisal notes that some Swaledale walls follow lines that probably go back to the Iron Age. Near Settle, a boundary wall at Authulnesmire may date from the twelfth century, when the land was given to Sawley Abbey. At Conistone, the earliest walls and banks are attributed to the medieval or monastic period.

Enclosure and pastoral management

Much of what you see around the Dales villages is the product of piecemeal enclosure. The walling handbook describes how, from the Elizabethan period onwards, cottagers were allowed to enclose small crofts, and how small intakes of one to three acres were walled off from the common in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The result is the maze of small, irregular fields that still cluster around many Dales villages; at Linton in Wharfedale, the walls still show the shape of the old open fields.

Beyond them lay the great common pastures, grazed under fixed allowances known as stints. At Settle, a rent bought one “cattlegate” and four “sheepgates”, the right to graze one beast and four sheep. These commons were divided up by Parliamentary enclosure, mostly between about 1750 and 1850. Landowners petitioned Parliament for a local Act, commissioners surveyed the land, and the common was divided into allotments, each to be walled by its new owner. The Park Authority’s appraisal notes that the larger farmers gained most, while smallholders lost their grazing rights. Settle’s commons were enclosed under an Act of 1757; those of Kettlewell and Conistone, which the tour passes, between 1801 and 1803.

Enclosure walls are easy to spot because they were drawn on a map. They run dead straight up the hillsides, regardless of the terrain, dividing the fell into large rectangular allotments. The commissioners specified how they were to be built. Johnson quotes the award for Kettlewell and Conistone, which required walls thirty-four inches wide at the bottom and six feet high, with twenty-one good throughstones in every rood, all to be finished within a year. In practice, he notes, landowners often fell short of the specification.

Field barns and the hay meadows

The walls and the field barns belong together. The Park Authority counts some 4,000 field barns in the National Park, and in Swaledale they are so dense, an average of fourteen per square kilometre, that in places there is almost one to every field. Known locally as cow houses or field houses, they stood in the meadows because inheritance had divided holdings into scattered plots, and it made sense to store hay and house cattle where the hay was grown.

The appraisal describes the yearly cycle. Cattle were kept off the meadows in spring so the grass could grow. Hay was cut in July and stored in the barn. In November the cattle moved into the byre below, and the farmer visited every day to feed and milk them. In May they went back up to the hill, and the manure was spread on the meadow. Most surviving barns were built or rebuilt between 1750 and 1850. In 1989 a large area of upper Swaledale and Arkengarthdale was designated as a barns and walls conservation area, which the Park Authority describes as the largest conservation area in the country.

Labour, skill and repair

Every wall represents a huge amount of work. At Conistone alone, Johnson calculates that almost nineteen miles of new walls were built in four pastures after enclosure, far more than any single waller could have managed even working every day of the year. A Yorkshire waller quoted by the Yorkshire Post reckons a wall weighs about a ton a yard. Wallers were, and are, typically paid by the length or area built.

As you pass, look for the features that tell you how a wall was made and used. Throughstones, long stones laid across the full width of the wall to bind its two faces, sometimes project on either side; the walling handbook notes they were not used before the eighteenth century. A row of upright stones, called cams or copes, runs along the top. Small openings at the base, called sheep creeps or smoots, let sheep or water through. Stone step stiles and gateposts mark old rights of way.

Many walls are now in decline. The Park Authority’s landscape assessment for Wensleydale describes crumbling walls on the upper slopes, and post-and-wire fencing has replaced stone in places. Since the 1980s a series of schemes has paid for repair. The Park Authority’s barns and walls scheme invested over £1.5 million between 1989 and 2001 in about 400 buildings and 20 kilometres of walls, and more recent programmes, including Farming in Protected Landscapes, have continued to fund restoration. The Dry Stone Walling Association, a charity founded in 1968, keeps the craft alive through training and competitions.

Walls as habitat and heritage

A dry-stone wall is also a home for wildlife. The Yorkshire Wildlife Trust notes that the Dales’ high rainfall favours mosses and lichens on the stones, and that wrens nest in walls while stoats, voles and shrews use them for shelter. The walling handbook notes that limestone walls carry a far richer flora than gritstone ones, including ferns such as rusty-back fern, which grows mainly on walls, and the orange lichens typical of limestone. The barns, too, shelter bats, barn owls and swallows.

The walls and meadows of the Dales are a single cultural landscape, made by people and animals over many centuries. Our broader article on dry-stone walls across the British Isles traces the craft in other regions.

Where does the tour see the walls?

On the thirteenth day, the tour drives through Settle, a market town whose charter dates from 1249, set beside England’s largest outcrop of limestone, and stops at the Ribblehead Viaduct, whose story is told in our article on the Ribblehead Viaduct. On the fifteenth day, the route crosses the Yorkshire Dales to Hawes in Wensleydale, where the Dales Countryside Museum, in the former railway station, portrays rural and village life, and the Wensleydale Creamery shows how the famous cheese is made. The drive continues across several dales and through Kettlewell before reaching Helmsley. Most of the walls are seen from the coach, and the museum and village visits involve gentle walking. The tour is rated Level 2 (Moderate).

Reading patterns from the road

As you cross the Dales, try reading the walls. Crooked, irregular walls close to a village are usually the oldest. Larger, more regular fields on the lower slopes suggest later enclosure. Long, straight walls running up the fell and over the top almost always belong to Parliamentary enclosure. Field barns standing in the meadows show where hay was made and cattle wintered. The colour of the stone tells you whether you are on limestone or grit.

The same principle runs through the whole tour: the walled fields of the Dales, the granite walls and commons of Dartmoor, explored in our article on Dartmoor’s commons, and the limestone walls of the Cotswolds, described in our article on Cotswold stone, each record a different way of farming and owning the land. Our guide to the England’s villages itinerary follows that thread from Sussex to Yorkshire, and the England’s villages small group tour is a fine way to see these landscapes with a guide who can help you read them.