Agricultural History Review, Volume 54 Part 1 (2006), p. 173

In this second edition of his earlier Shire volume, Lawrence Garner offers a comprehensive and beautifully-illustrated survey of the craft of the dry stone waller whose works, fascinating in their variety and charm, captivate the traveller through Britain. Gwynedd or Gloucestershire, Sutherland or Derby, Yorkshire or County Down, the regional and local variation of wall construction, dependent upon both geological and agricultural considerations, cannot fail to delight. With enthusiasm and learning tempered by long practical experience, Garner outlines the peculiarities of walling materials and the practical problems involved in their utilization in different parts of the country. While dating will always remain a problem, he discusses the earlier, rather crude walls whose origins probably lay in early clearance and moves us quickly on to a consideration of the enclosures of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries constructed by specialist craftsmen. In so doing he introduces some splendid technical terms which may be familiar to readers of this Review possessed of a more esoteric vocabulary range than myself. But I somehow doubt that many of my readers would identify a ‘cripple’, ‘lunky’ or ‘smoot’ as a hole at the bottom of a wall by which sheep gain access to the adjoining field!

Although Lawrence Garner admires the magnificent mountain walls of Gwynedd, he is less than enthusiastic about kindred enclosures in the south of Wales where building was more ‘optimistic and intuitive than skilful’ and where the limited use of throughstones and coping was to be deplored. The problem, of course, is that in much of Wales south of Machynlleth there is little good walling stone and for this reason the earth and stone bank topped with a quickset hedge is the main form of enclosure. If Mr Garner, in his capacity as director of the Dry Stone Walling Association, would come to Ceredigion and show me how to build a half-decent wall with our local shale and rounded conglomerate I will be in his debt! A great deal of interest is currently being shown in the restoration of derelict stone walls across the land and thanks to the efforts of bodies like the Dry Stone Walling Association and the British Trust for Conservation Volunteers the number of people receiving training in the craft is on the increase. I suspect that as environmental imperatives become of over-riding importance their skills will be increasingly required, and in that case the dedication of men like Lawrence Garner towards the preservation of the appropriate craft skills will be amply justified.

I would not be in the least surprised to learn that the versatile Tom Williamson builds a mean stone wall. Even a cursory review of the last thirty years of rural literature suggests that there is little to which this historian, archaeologist and smallholder is not prepared to turn his hand, usually to excellent effect. On this occasion he focuses his attention on that rather disagreeable mammal, the rabbit, reintroduced to this country by the Normans. More especially he is interested in the rabbit warren and the two thousand or so recorded pillow mounds, prominent features of the warrens from medieval times. To the confusion of some archaeologists who have interpreted them as neolithic burial structures, pillow mounds, rectangular, square, polygonal or ‘V’ shaped, were an important element of the landscape before the eighteenth century when agricultural developments allowed the cultivation of land occupied by the vast warrens. Williamson offers detailed descriptions both of the distribution and construction of surviving pillow mounds and of the embankments, fences, walls and ditches enclosing the warrens themselves. While some were of simple dump construction from spoil dug from the surrounding ditch, others were made of material brought from afar, while others yet, like those in the Welsh uplands, comprised carefully elaborated stone-capped artificial burrows cut into the ground surface below the mound. A good warrener would ensure above all that the pillow mound remained dry since rabbits will not tolerate wet conditions, and accordingly every effort was made to retain sloping sides and to maintain regular coverage of the upper surface by throwing material from the surrounding ditch to the top of the mound.

Design and construction of mounds also had to take into account the need to catch the inmates at appropriate times of the year and Williamson discusses the various combinations of dogs, ferrets, nets and pit and tip traps used for this purpose. As with his descriptions of vermin traps and the operational minutiae of the warren, Williamson’s text is admirably clear, lavishly illustrated, succinct and of abiding interest. My only quibble lies with his section on the few surviving warreners’ ‘lodges’ where warreners lived and stored their carcases, skins, nets, traps and other paraphernalia. I wonder whether it is always right to assume that merely because a contemporary farmhouse or pub close to a former warren is called a ‘lodge’ that it was necessarily the lodging of the warrener. Take the case of Thomas Tresham’s outstanding late sixteenth century folly, the Triangular Lodge near Rushton Hall in Northamptonshire. On the grounds that this astonishing building, a profound and esoteric meditation on the Trinity, is mentioned as ‘warrener’s’ lodge in a set of estate accounts, Williamson assumes that it served that vulgar function. He may, of course, be right. Yet, having played in that spooky folly as a child and been brought up in the belief that Tresham and his pals hatched the Gunpowder Plot within its walls, I profoundly hope that he is wrong!