North Yorks Moors Walls

Walls on the North Yorkshire moors can be divided into two styles.
a) Double wall, which as the picture left shows, a wall built with two separate sides of stone. and

b) Single wall as shown in the lower picture which consists of a single stones placed on top of each other. These are common on remoter farms and moorland

Walls here are basically sandstone in the northern part of the park and oolitic limestone in the southern half.;

Copes, (the top row of stones) pronounced "corpse" locally, consist mainly of large slabs placed flat, irregular blocks placed on their sides or regular blocks of varying quality as the top photo shows.

Walls vary in height from 4ft to 5ft and start at around 27"wide at the base.

Almost all walls using cut stone are set in place traced which means instead of being put with their length into the wall, they are placed brick fashion, lengthways along the wall. This is common practice.

Whilst most of our wall have quite thick stone this wall on the Whitby Scarborough road has quite thin and square stone. It is the only example I know like this here although I have seen similar stone in upper Swaledale in the Yorkshire Dales.

Buck & Doe coping on a wall near KirkMoor beck on the Scarborough Whitby Rd.

This type of cope is rather rare anywhere on the North Yorkshire Moors

Irish Drystone Walls

Ireland has the greatest variation in wall than any other country I'm aware. The picture above is from County Clare in the west and this wall is constructed from large slabs of Lisscannor limestone. Like many Irish walls (There called ditches in Ireland) they are filled with till/clay.

In the south west of Ireland especially on and around the Mizen and the Beara peninsular walls are built by placing the stones vertically. This demands a totally different thought process for the waller as demonstrated here on this slope where the builder has had to place longer slabs into the wall to prevent the higher part of the wall sliding down. This builder as is quite normal hasn't got any copes on top but you do sometimes see these walls with a neat top of copes.

To read more:-

This article is based on my observations over ten years living in the southwest of Ireland in County Cork and was originally written for Sean Adcock of the NorthWales branch of the DSWA.

The article as originally written is available as a pdf file here

County Clare in SW Ireland has a landscape similar to the limestone areas of the Yorkshire dales.

Here is a new wall built around 1992 from a combination of field gathered boulders and the copes of limestone slabs from the limestone 'pavement'

Although this might appear to be an untidy example of drystone walling, building with irregular stones such as these is extremely skilled.

Stooks - Gate Posts

Just above the National Trust campsite in Great Langdale in Cumbria I found this old example of a gate entrance. Round holes on one side and square ones on the other. Don't quite know why they are different but...... They look nice.

Stoops or Gate Posts now hang gates. But a long time ago gates consisted of five or six wood poles inserted into holes in the stoops. In this part of North Yorkshire these are almost always consist of a horizontal rebate with aright angle turn downwards to hold the wooden pole.(see below)

This is the only example of a post with a curved rebate I've seen. Note also that the top rebate is coming from the other field side of the gate. This makes it difficult for cattle to lift them off. This example is immediately west of Bransdale Mill.






This is the normal stoop with 5 rebates for rails. This well preserved stoop with holes on the other side of the opening is near Glaisdale on the old road/track leading from the ford at the railway bridge. Notice the superb wall seperating Arncliffe woods from the field.