Traditional Dry Stone wall construction

How to build a wall to last a thousand years! Neither cement nor mortar needed, just weight, friction and knowhow.

A few of you have seen various images of mine which included these very northern British traditional dry-stone walls. You may ask yourself – “why build a wall like this over a field in the middle of nowhere to keep a few cattle or sheep in the right field?” The answer might be in the British dogmatic pride - “If a job is worth doing, it is worth doing it well!” however a few practicalities are also at play here. First of all, wood in these areas was in short supply or in landowners hands that would not allow the use of much, whilst stone was available under much of these hills. The walls also had a very practical purpose for the animals, especially the sheep which were the main livestock here. Our winters were often very harsh, especially here in these high hills and the sheep could and did, take shelter behind the sturdy windproof walls. These walls were live-savers to them and so a farmers friend. Another real point is that, when a farmer constructed these walls, he was planning ahead for generations of his family not to have to build them again.

This taken on a walk near the Saddleworth villages of Delph and Diggle, about three miles from my home. Local quarried, grit-stone cut blocks here, maybe hundreds of years old. Most of these will have been shaped by hand with hand-tools. The expert who is building this wall will search through all the stones to find the best and closest fit to the next adjacent stones on the wall. The whole construction starts quite wide and slowly tapers upwards –he is using these metal guides but often it is all done by eye with no clever aids like these. Smaller pieces and rubble often fill the gaps between the two separate stone sides and then thinner (but still heavy) stones are laid edgewise along the top. The final weight of those, press downward and keeps the whole construction ‘rock’ steady! The main reason for these walls eventually failing is man’s intervention of climbing over them and pulling stones off or land movement itself. Once the top stones have been moved or removed the whole section of wall gets unstable.

A nice example of these walls in the Pip and preceding photo.

Have a good day.