I'm in Stoke for work, so took a trip to the Peak District yesterday evening to walk up Mam Tor. Such a gorgeous place!
It got me wondering, though. The walls that are used instead of hedges, in areas like this. How long have they been standing? Are we talking <50 years? 50-100? Older?
by Madajuk
35 comments
Some of the ones in the Peak District go back to medieval times. Dry stone walls, or at least the technique of building them has been around for thousands of years.
Walls have likely been in those places for hundreds of years.
These exact walls may vary though as they need rebuilding etc. You would mostly find it hard to tell if they have been rebuilt as they try to use the original stones.
Dry stone walling is an amazing skill and a proper artform imo
This is known as a dry stone wall, they can last 100+ years, but as ever it is totally dependent upon location, weather and luck.
The oldest ones near me go back to the Bronze Age. They’re a bit like Trigger’s broom though!
Dry stone walling has been around for a very long time. Can be thousands of years old.
Naturally depends on when the land was split into fields etc.
They are like triggers ~~brush~~ broom.
Every decade or so sections will be rebuilt when they start to collapse or get damaged.
The original wall could easily have been their centuries, but part of it could have been rebuilt last week.
Older.
Depending on the wall, some are newer.
They became most numerous in the 18th and 19th century following the enclosure act.
So in short upto 250 years max. But likely 150ish I would guess.
https://www.ywt.org.uk/blog/wild-ingleborough/dry-stone-walls-yorkshire-dales#:~:text=The%20history%20of%20dry%20stone%20walls%20dates,in%20straight%20lines%20for%20miles%20on%20end.
I don’t know if it’s true but I was told that with some of the dry stone walls in the lake district it was as much about clearing the fields of rocks as it was actually needing a wall.
Some of them will be decades, if not centuries old. Others are much newer, and built in the style of the old dry stone walls. My Granddad lives up in that area, and spent years working around the peak district building new dry stone walls, and repaired the old damaged ones when they fall down.
Depends.
The one in my garden has bits over 100 years old, some is about 2 years old as I rebuilt it round my shed.
The technique is very old, maybe 2000BC or something like that. If the field has never been used for sheep, and the land is stable, they easily last 100s of years. Sheep tend to knock them over as they climb over them though, so the lake district they tend of have been at least repaired in the last 20 years or so. I’ve helped repair a wall which had been standing for at least 400 years, as a boundary to a wood.
That’s a bit of a Ship of Theseus question.
The walls are strong but they still decay and need repairing.
It is called a “Dry Stone Wall” of you want to Google it.
Occasionally they date back to neolithic times (but would have been rebuilt many times on the same foundation). Courses are still taught in how to build them; so the age is somewhere between 0 and 5000 years!
Most were built in the eighteenth century, however some date back 2000+ years back to the iron age.
Wall building served two purposes, one to clear the Fields of stones and the other to enclose fields to keep livestock in.
The technique ia ancient, the age of a particular wall will depend on the history of land ownership and usage, road building and enclosure. Dry stone walls are constantly being repaired and rebuilt, so the answer is brand new and hundreds of years old.
Napoleonic era POWs did a lot of dry stone walling, according to a panel I read in Edinburgh castle museum (where Napoleonic era prisoners were stashed)
Is this post going to lead to another post next week where somone has backed there car into a farmers wall?
Just ask Gerald
I built one of these walls in January. Directly next to it was a wall older than the village that was built around it. If I showed you the two side by side you would not be able to distinguish them.
Got any nice pics from up Mam Tor?
It’s the collective effort of generations and generations. Somebody builds one and then their descendants maintain it. Rebuilding all of them would be an absolutely monumental task. Especially if the stone wasn’t being reused. It reminds of me Madagascar where every valley is perfectly flat as a football pitch even if it’s absolutely vast. Because generations and generations have shifted dirt around to make paddy fields.
I saw the picture before reading the caption and thought “that looks like walls in my neck of the woods” – not far off! I’m 9 miles from Mam Tor and this is what my garden walls look like too.
<50 years would be the 70’s.
I’m not sure about the region but in Cornwall some of our “hedges” are amount the older man made structures on the planet still serving thier original purpose. Thats, in the thousands of years category.
I always wonder this, I get the idea they’re 500+ years old but at the same time if it’s that old it can’t be original
at least as old a Gerald.
Depends where you are and how big of a structure it is there are ancient cattle roads across Britain from the neolithic so It could be a few thousand years old
https://preview.redd.it/bdlwttav5maf1.jpeg?width=700&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=a1cf99c13139d89769dfcff35520d4ae8f1d079a
The walls are probably as old as farming. The walls are field stone, cleared to make food production easier. Built as walls, they make food production more secure.
There may have been many repairs to the original walls but built well, they last a century or more. .
Old enough to make me feel guilty about not even lasting 30 minutes on a treadmill.
But will a lot of the stones themselves be mostly the original ones reused over many centuries? Surely this is the case. Nobody here seems to be answering that question.
Likely as long as the farms have been there.
Stony grassland -> stoneless fields + walls.
Depends.
Probably older than America.
I used to be a stone mason, probably spent 400 days dry stone walking,mostly in the early 90s.
They are ageless, insofar as the walls have been knocked down, moved, rebuilt so many times it is ridiculous, unlike Triggers broom, or Robin Hoods Axe when I was a lass, most of the walls are original, just put together in a different way, endlessly. They tend to last about 100 years before failing unless actively maintained, a few stones get dislodged and the bastard sheep demolish the rest jumping over.
But dry stone walks, mostly made from the same stones you see today have graced the British landscape in some form since humans started raising animals. Tens of thousands of years.
The first structures used I believe were round pens, corners being more work, the animals coralled into them at night to protect from predators. Then the shepherd would roam with his flock. Partitioning of land meant more walls to be built.
There were mostly built by the shepherds as the watched their flocks, this was before they used the time to wash their socks. Using basically field stones, stones just picked out of the landscape and stacked. So a wall you could see today may have taken many generations to build. For much of the year they had little else to do.
Dressing the stones only really started during the iron age.
Farmer here.
If they’re anything like mine they about 2 weeks old as I’m constantly rebuilding them when they fall down
Can be ancient to yesterday. Where I grew up they were everywhere, and there were a couple of spots cars loved to crash through. The farmer seemed to know what he was doing with the repairs. So some very ‘new’ bits in the mix.
Comments are closed.