DRYSTONE WALLS PROTECT OUR LANDSCAPE AND WILDLIFE
A view from the farm
Are you good at geography? If so, here’s a question for you. What do Orkney, Westmorland, Cornwall, the Cotswolds and the North Riding of Yorkshire all have in common?
Well, apart from being some of the most beautiful parts of the British Isles, they’re all famous for their drystone walls. In fact, many upland areas can boast of having hundreds of miles of these age-old boundaries, built with skill and precision without cement or mortar.
From brown sandstone in Derbyshire to granite on Dartmoor, they are not only a much-loved feature of the local landscape but also an unlikely wildlife habitat, providing a place to hibernate for frogs, toads and newts, and providing shelter to hedgehogs, field mice, wrens, pied wagtails and more.
I’m Gloucestershire born and bred, so Cotswold walls are my favourite. The handsome honey-coloured oolitic limestone has been quarried locally for generations and there are drystone walls all over our farm. They skirt the fields and line the roads that stretch across the hills to the horizon.
When bathed in sunlight, the stone takes on a warm, inviting glow. With many barns, cottages, manor houses and churches across the region built of the material, the Cotswolds has become a world-renowned tourist destination. Even on a crisp January morning, the walls outside the farmhouse window are a beautiful sight. The early shafts of light reveal a coating of frost that makes the spider webs on the top stones glisten and the whole structure seems to hold back a drifting blanket of low mist in the field beyond.
It’s a timeless scene and one that would have been familiar to our ancestors since the Bronze Age. The oldest surviving drystone walls in the UK can be found at the remains of the 5,000-year-old Neolithic village of Skara Brae in Orkney.
POOR SUBSTITUTE
Over the centuries, drystone walls haven’t made the news often but a recent row in the Cotswold village of Selsley hit the national headli
