A Landscape Built Stone by Stone

Walk almost anywhere in the Yorkshire Dales and you are walking through a working landscape that was largely drawn in stone. The walls that ladder up the fellsides, divide the pastures and thread through the villages are not scenery in the decorative sense. They are farm infrastructure, built to hold sheep, mark boundaries and shelter stock, and most of them were raised during the parliamentary enclosures of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Some follow older lines — medieval boundaries, monastic holdings, even prehistoric field systems on the limestone plateau.

What makes them rewarding to walk beside is that they are legible. Once you know what you are looking at, a wall tells you about the rock beneath your boots, the weather, the sheep it was built for, and the waller who laid it.

Why Walls Look Different from Dale to Dale

The single biggest clue is geology. In the south and centre of the Dales — Wharfedale, Littondale, Malhamdale, the limestone country around Ingleborough — walls are built of Carboniferous limestone. It splits into flat slabs and flags, so it stacks neatly, weathers to a pale grey and catches the light on a bright afternoon. In the north, around Swaledale, Wensleydale and the higher gritstone edges, you will find millstone grit and sandstone: darker, coarser, often rounded into boulders that need more sorting and more patience.

That difference shows up in the finished wall. Limestone walls tend to look tidy and regular, almost coursed. Gritstone walls look chunkier and more varied, with bigger stones at the base and a rougher face. Within a single dale you will notice local quirks too, because wallers used whatever was nearest — stone cleared from the field, quarried from a small delph, or pulled from a beck. A wall built of two different stones usually tells you the waller ran out and went back for more.

Coping Stones: The Signature on Top

Look at the top of any Dales wall and you are looking at its coping, the finishing course that sheds water and protects the fill beneath. In the Dales the commonest is combed coping: large stones set on edge, roughly vertical, packed tightly with smaller stones wedged between them. From a distance it reads as a comb, and it is remarkably durable.

Elsewhere in the north you will see pairs of coping stones laid alternately — one upright, one flat — a pattern known in some neighbouring counties as cock and hen. Some walls carry a rounded coping of half-round stones, and a few have flat coping slabs laid like a roof. Coping matters more than it looks. Water getting into the heart of a wall freezes, expands and pushes it apart, which is why a wall with a broken top will fail long before a wall with a sound one.

Gaps, Smoot Holes and Squeeze Stiles

The most charming feature of a Dales wall is the deliberate gap. Many walls have what are usually called smoot holes — small square openings at ground level or a little above it, built in rather than broken through. They let sheep move between pastures without a gate being opened, and they let hares and rabbits pass freely under a wall that would otherwise be a barrier.

You will also meet other openings:

• Squeeze stiles — narrow gaps in the wall that a walker can edge through sideways, but a sheep cannot.
• Step stiles — stones protruding from the wall to climb over, often worn smooth in the middle.
• Gateway stoops — the solid upright stones that once carried a wooden gate or a hurdle.
• Bields — short lengths of wall built as a shelter for sheep on an exposed fellside, sometimes curved into a rough C-shape.

Each of these is a small piece of engineering born of a specific problem, and each is worth pausing at rather than simply crossing.

Throughstones, Footings and the Waller's Craft

A Dales wall is not one wall but two, built face to face with a core of smaller stones between them. Every few metres, long stones called throughstones are laid across the full width, tying the two faces together and stopping them from bulging. Without them, a wall leans and eventually collapses. It is the detail that separates a wall that lasts a century from one that lasts a decade.

Below ground, the wall sits on footings: a shallow trench with the largest stones bedded in, often dug slightly into the slope. The best wallers sort their stone into sizes as they go, keeping the big, flat, weight-bearing pieces for the base and the throughs, the medium stones for the faces, and the small material for the hearting. No cement, no mortar, no pins — just weight, friction and the skill of reading a stone's shape.

Walking Beside Them: Practical Notes

Walls are a pleasure to walk beside, but they are also someone's fencing, and repairs cost real money. A few habits keep them in good order and keep you on the right side of local farmers.

• Cross at a stile or gate, never by climbing over the coping. Loose stones are what start a collapse.
• Squeeze stiles were not built for large rucksacks. Take yours off and pass it through first.
• Leave gates as you find them, and keep dogs on a lead anywhere near sheep — especially between January and April.
• Follow the public right of way where there is one, and give a wide berth to ewes with lambs.
• If a wall has collapsed across a path, it is usually easier — and kinder — to walk around the broken section than to scramble over it.

Slow down for a moment at the next wall you meet. Trace the coping with your eye, find a throughstone, peer through a smoot hole. You are reading a document written in local stone, adjusted by weather and sheep ever since.