Preserving the Past, Sustaining Wildlife: The Role of Dry Stone Walls in the Yorkshire Dales

The Yorkshire Dales National Park is much loved for its unique and dramatic landscapes and geology, from rolling drumlin hills to rocky crags and the expanses of limestone pavement terraces. The Yorkshire ‘Three Peaks’; Pen-y-Ghent, Ingleborough and Whernside, are well known nationally as an ambitious hiking challenge, looming over the western edge of the Dales and seen for miles around.

One feature in particular, overlooked by some and admired by others, is the unfathomable network of walls criss-crossing and connecting the hills and fields. It is hard to imagine the Yorkshire Dales without dry stone walls, now such an iconic sight and inspiration for local poets, photographers and artists alike.

Dry stone walls are not only visually interesting to us but they can also have historical value due to their age, geological characteristics and regional construction methods. For sure, the Dales would not be what it is today without its walls. They have shaped the region’s agricultural heritage and link us to our past.

The History and Craftsmanship of Dry Stone Walls

The history of dry stone walls dates back centuries, and different time periods often utilised different building methods of walling which helps us date them to particular eras. Many of the walls we see today are a result of the Enclosures Act of the late 1700s and typically run in straight lines for miles on end. Older walls from earlier periods are often more fluctuating in the landscape and used to drove livestock up the fells or keep out predatory animals.

The technical aspect of building walls out of locally sourced stone without using mortar has been inherited to us from past generations, passed down through families and land workers who taught the ways of keeping up their boundaries to enclose stock, establish land ownership and to shelter livestock in the colder months.

The Ecological Importance of Dry Stone Walls

There is a benefit to having around five thousand miles of dry stone wall in the Yorkshire Dales – it happens to be nice habitat for our fluffy and feathery friends!

The method of building walls without mortar results in small gaps between the face stones which creates a tiny passage into the more spacious middle of the wall, which can serve as the perfect place for a nesting bird. Wrens are regularly seen (and heard!), hopping along dry stone walls and quickly vanishing inside them, using the space within the wall as mini caves to nest in. This has been observed in the past when naming the wren, as their scientific name, Troglodytes troglodytes, literally means ‘cave-dweller’!

Other birds that like to use hollows and holes for their nest sites such as song thrushes and redstarts are also known to occasionally use a dry stone wall for a sheltered location.

song thrush perched on a drystone wall with its head tilted to its left to face the camera — Song thrush (c) Karen Lloyd

The shelter and structure of the wall benefits the small mammals too. Mice, shrews and voles may take up residence, and occasionally stoats reveal themselves a few metres down the wall from wall repairs, coming to check on the quality of the construction no doubt!

As with stones upturned in your own garden, the walls are filled with hundreds of invertebrates such as violet beetles, spiders, woodlice and centipedes.

In large fields and grasslands where there are no shrubs or trees to perch in, a drystone wall can be a welcome feeding post for birds, especially birds of prey like owls. Owl pellets from barn owls can be found on dry stone walls around fields where voles are plenty, and the pellets of little owls are a fusion of invertebrate parts.

There are benefits to biodiversity when a wall is occupied by nature, especially in the Dales where the rainfall favours the growth of mosses and lichens. In our rocky, shallow soil areas where hedges are not viable or hard to maintain, a dry stone wall acts as a stone hedge in a way, providing a structure and an edge to the habitat, shade and shelter. The mosses and lichens are capturing carbon from the atmosphere as they grow, sometimes in glorious green mossy carpets.

Conservation Efforts and Challenges

Nature finds a friend in a Dales dry stone wall, but it is perhaps a relationship that we are as much a part of as our flora and fauna.

Preserving the integrity of style and character while maintaining the structural integrity of dry stone walls is an effort that is ongoing - the scale of the work involved to keep on top of all the walls in the Dales is huge as some landowners have less time, money or need for the walls to be repaired.

Dry stone walls face damage by the elements due to erosion of land, frost, storms and flooding which cannot be prevented and may become bigger challenges in an era of climatic changes.

Vandalism is also a problem particularly popular rambling routes where people may decide to take a short cut over a wall and knock a few stones off in the process.

There are community efforts and projects which bring volunteers into the dry stone walling craft and gives them the skills to make their own dry stone wall repairs, or give their time to help others restore their walls.

Wild Ingleborough Dry Stone Walling Team - photo taken by Sara — Wild Ingleborough volunteers have contributed an amazing 2,700 hours to the project since 2021 - photo taken by Sara

Yorkshire Wildife Trust offers volunteering opportunities to help maintain the dry stone walls around nature reserves in the Yorkshire Dales such as at Grass Wood near Grassington and at the reserves within the Wild Ingleborough Program area.

Get involved

Conclusion

The relationship between nature and dry stone walls in the Yorkshire Dales is as intertwined as the link between heritage and future conservation efforts regarding land use changes and the preservation of habitat and local history.

They are as important to our wildlife as they are to us, and whether the walls are seen as man’s dominion of the landscape or works of masterful sculpture, they are a tapestry of habitat and heritage that deserve appreciation.

A beautiful pink sunrise over Ashes Pasture.

Ashes Pasture - (C) John Potter

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