Agricultural History Review, Volume 65 Part 2 (2017), p. 344

As someone living on a hill farm in the North Pennines, who has a keen interest in its landscape and traditions, and also being an amateur dry stone waller, I have long desired a book like this. Angus Winchester was already familiar from The harvest of the hills. Rural life in northern England and the Scottish Borders, 1400–1700 (2000), his ground-breaking study of pastoral farming that combined assiduous documentary research with expert field surveys and amply showed his personal affection for, as well as his informed understanding of, this region. Dry stone walls demonstrates the same methodology and attitude.

As the author declares in his Introduction, this book’s focus ‘is unashamedly on northern England, which possesses some of the highest concentrations of dry stone walls’ in the country (p. 8). His cases of particular walls are nearly all from Cumbria, Derbyshire and the Yorkshire Dales. Readers based elsewhere, especially in Wales, might thus be disappointed. Moreover, he is concerned almost exclusively with walls as field enclosures and property boundaries. Sheepfolds (pp. 73–7) and bields (pp. 77–9) are discussed, but not houses, farm outbuildings, churches, fortifications, mine workings, rabbit warrens, monuments, curricks or follies, even though any of these features – depending on their age and location – might potentially provide informative examples of the dry stone waller’s craft. Such structures await serious study in this context.

The strict parameters of Winchester’s survey enable him to conduct a systematic and fairly thorough appraisal of dry stone walls as primarily barriers to the movement of animals, by far their most common function. These walls must together stretch for thousands of miles through the northern and western regions of the British countryside. It is most important for the observer to understand that ‘the modern landscape of dry stone walls does not date from a single period but is a composite production, reflecting a range of historical processes from the medieval period to the nineteenth century’ (p. 92). In the first section of this book, Winchester presents a convincing account of how these processes occurred and their characteristic signs in the routes, materials and construction of walls. The clear and edifying photographs are commendable. Winchester admits ‘that few attempts to identify distinctive features of medieval walls are wholly convincing’ (p. 20); but the presence of orthostats and boulders strongly suggest antiquity, while an H-profile more specifically evinces a medieval or early modern date. The main problem when trying to date walls from their morphology is that they will have been periodically repaired and very possibly entirely rebuilt during their past. However, because wallers are reluctant to undertake any unnecessary labour, the course of a wall, any firm foundations that are in place, most of the other building material already there, and probably the existing height and profile of a wall are all likely to be retained unless there has been a compelling reason to change any of them.

By far the greatest mileage of dry stone walling, instantly recognisable by its straight lines, originates from the era of parliamentary enclosure. The form and building technique of walls also became fairly standardized and the occupation of professional waller began then, when there were many more wallers than there are today. One of Winchester’s intriguing details is that, in the late eighteenth century, a ‘waller might expect to be paid around 2 shillings per rood of 7 yards (6.4 metres) – roughly a day’s work’ (p. 43). Rough indeed! This is considerably beyond what a modern waller, working to a decent standard, would comfortably undertake. Maybe there is an invisible second waller (paid part of that 2 shillings) and a boy (the son of either of these, possibly paid nothing, whose job was mainly to gather or create heartings) invisible in that record; otherwise it really was grim up north.

The second section of the book is a field guide to the features to be seen in dry stone walls. The different kinds of local stone, along with aesthetics and pride in good workmanship, have determined regional walling styles. The normal components of a wall, such as throughs, copestones (known variously as cams, capstones, capes or combers, depending on location), sheep creeps (or unkies) and smouts, the necessary gates and stiles to allow human movement, an interesting range of gateposts and stoops (as well as harr-hanging to avoid installing either), and more specialized features such as bee boles, rabbit smouts and initialled stones (these denoted either land ownership or responsibility for maintaining a stretch of wall) are each clearly described and explained. Curiously, hares’ leaps, distinct from rabbit smouts by being positioned about halfway up the wall instead of at ground level, are not mentioned. It is unfortunate that the author has included, as an alternative for ‘sheep creep’, the term ‘cripple hole’, when that name has been quietly relinquished by wallers in recent years. Winchester’s stated dimensions of traditional skeps (p. 73) are questionable in that any examples of the smallest – as little as 25 cm in diameter and 18 cm high – are almost certainly supers, for vertically extending the capacity of a bee hive. The photographs in this section include some examples of walls built of challenging material, showing not only the necessity of using whatever stone was close to hand but also the ingenuity and skill of particular wallers. Winchester includes the reuse of building materials (including stones from Hadrian’s Wall and other Roman edifices) and odd items (such as fragments of hand querns and clay pipes) sometimes found inside walls, which might help to date them (pp. 83–5).

Deeply informed by the author’s expert knowledge of northern England’s landscape history as well as fully conversant with the techniques and terminology of dry stone walling, this book will be useful to agricultural historians. Lucidly written, methodically arranged, well illustrated and full of intriguing examples, it will also be accessible and engaging for the general reader. And most particularly, all dry stone wallers will enjoy and benefit from reading it.