PETER QUINCE
Return visits often produce unforeseen impressions. I have just spent a few days in the Pennines, the mountains of northern England which formed the landscape of my boyhood. To my surprise it was not the slopes or the moors or the valleys of that noble region which most impressed me after a longish absence — nor was it, in fact, any purely natural feature of the scene. The detail which stirred my memory quickest was the wonderful network of dry-stone walls which earlier generations have imposed upon the Yorkshire dales — hundreds and hundreds of miles of laboriously-erected boundaries which stretch across the whole mountain chain, straddling steep hillsides and comfortable meadows with equal confidence and permanence.
When I lived there, I remember, these stone walls were taken for granted in much the same way as the hills themselves. It seemed perfectly natural that every lonely moorland track, crossing some great bare stretch of heather, should be bordered by massive stone walls; equally that every slope, however precipitous, should be marked out by those dark grey barriers which at times seemed to , ignore the laws of gravity as they followed the shortest route to the top.
Looking now with something of the eye of A stranger, I find it impossible to accept this inheritance from the past so casually.
Perhaps it is because we are accustomed today to the idea that most farmers detest hedges and walls of every kind; for perhaps it is because the thought of the immense labour which went into the construction of those walls, over many generations, conflicts so sharply with present-day attitudes towards the proper use of manpower on the land.
In any case, the stone walls of the northern hills have become today as much an ancient monument as some ruined Cistercian abbey. They belong to a different world, and yet they contribute something valuable and distinctive to the landscape of this world. They are even still of practical value to the modern dalesman, unlike the picturesque ruin; and as long as it pays him to keep the black-faced hill sheep on his thin pastures they are likely to continue so.
It is sometimes said that the building of dry-stone walls is a lost art, but it is nothing of the sort. Many dales farms, have someone about the place who is able to manage their construction — or, as he is more usually required to do, see to their repair. The usual problem is not lack of skill but lack of time to do the work, for putting up a stone wall is not a speedy job. I have seen hefty young dalesmen taking part in a wall-building contest at an agricultural show in Wharfedale, and although the pace at which they handle the heavy rocks is impresive, they can hardly be expected to compete with the speed at which a wire fence can be installed.
Folk memories in remote places are usually long, which makes it all the stranger that so few dales people know much about the history of their heritage of stone walls. Hardly any of them, in my experience, have more than the haziest knowledge of their age or how they came to be built. They simply accept them (as I used to do) as a permanent feature of the landscape. The fact is that the bulk of these walls date from the middle of the eighteenth century, and hardly any are less than a hundred years old. They are the local monuments of the great enclosure movement which did so much to transform the English scene.
A great many have their history accurately recorded in documents relating to the enclosures. Old common pasture was enclosed and divided among farmers on strict terms, and the style and dimensions of the walls were usually carefully prescribed. The custom was to stipulate a wall up to six feet in height, with a width of perhaps three feet at the base barrowing to a ridge of capstones' a foot across. The weight of stone required for such a barrier was formidable — substantially more than a ton per yard; but the materials, of course, were always at hand on those rocky uplands. The labour was provided cheaply enough, either by the local men or by itinerant bands of wall-builders who travelled the hills, living in barns or huts, rather like small-scale rural precursors of the great gangs of railway navvies who later left their own equally distinctive mark on the countryside.
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