The pennine walls

Raistrick Arthur

Dalesman Books, softcover, illustrated.

Origin of Walls

MANY visitors to the Dales country are at once attracted and puzzled by the miles and miles of stone walls that cover the valleys in a maze, and climb up the fell sides, disappearing in the distance over the highest summits. The true-born North Country man would feel that something vital was taken from the landscape if the intricate pattern of grey or brownish black walls, the Jeep velvety lines of shadow that they cast, and the brilliance of their sunlit tops, were missing. The lovely, rounded contours of the Cheviots, the gaunt mountains of much of Scotland, seem at first sight strangely familiar, and yet strangely different to the visitor from the Dales; the fells and the moorland tops, the streams and gorges, are all familiar, but the absence or rarity of walls dividing up the wide expanse of country rob the views of a familiar pattern and texture which seems a natural part of the Pennine slopes.

When was this pattern of walls superimposed on our countryside? Who built the walls, why and how? These are frequent questions that one hears not only from occasional visitors, but from Dales born and bred people as well. The answer to these simple questions will need to be lengthy, the vast mileage of the walls, the hundreds, even thousands of square miles of country enclosed by them, alone make them worthy of a considered answer. First let us regard them as a pattern overlaid on the countryside. The pattern has appeared very differently to different people, and these differences have significance. Here are three fairly recent descriptions of walls in the Dales. "The stone walls run up the hills in lines and squares like an old geometrical design whose meaning has long been lost” (Pontefract). "You will see the land partitioned by stone walls into curiously irregular conformations, as unsymmetrical and grotesque as if they had been planned by some freakish surveyor in a fit of ...........................