By Porter Lang
Look at the top of the wall first. The copes tell you more than the rest of it.
One source we read, an article on dry stone walling in a building conservation journal, says the copestones on top of a wall are the main feature that gives it its distinctive local character. That is a useful rule for a walker. The body of a wall is stones laid in courses. The top is where a region signs its work.
What a dry stone wall is
Wikipedia defines it as a method of building without mortar to bind the stones. What holds it together is the choice and placing of the stones. It describes a foundation of large flat stones set on subsoil and getting smaller as the wall rises, and the voids between the facing stones packed with smaller ones, called filling or hearting. At intervals, large tie-stones or through stones span both faces, and sometimes stick out, to bond the wall. On top go the copes, also called capstones or coping stones, laid across the width to stop the faces drifting apart.
The Cotswolds landscape body, in a leaflet on its walls, adds the shape. A wall tapers in cross section, a slope it calls the batter, with the top roughly half as wide as the base. It also says that in the Cotswolds the most common coping is “cock and hen,” thin stones set vertically across the top.
How much of it is there
Estimates differ, and the differences are interesting. The building conservation article gives about 200,000 kilometres of dry stone walls and dykes across Britain. A 1988 survey, according to Wikipedia’s Yorkshire Dales article, found just over 4,971 miles, or 8,000 kilometres, in the Dales. The Cotswolds leaflet says the Cotswolds Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty holds at least 4,000 miles. These are surveys of different areas made in different years, so they do not add up to one total. Another page we read says only that thousands of miles of wall exist in Yorkshire alone.
When they went up
The dates are layered. Wikipedia says dry stone construction in north-west Europe goes back to the Neolithic, and that a field system in County Mayo, Ireland, has been carbon-dated to 3800 BC. It also says many walls in Scotland can be dated to the fourteenth century or earlier. The Cotswolds leaflet names Belas Knap, near Winchcombe, built around 2000 BC, as the earliest known example in the area.
Most of the walls you see in England, though, come from a later wave. The Cotswolds leaflet says construction peaked in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, when large tracts of open field and downland were enclosed for livestock. The building conservation article ties the boom to enclosure acts. A walling association history we read says walls have been a permanent feature of the landscape for over 200 years.
Same method, different wall
The conservation article lists regional variations. In England, in the middle and north, walls tend to be regularly coursed in sandstone and limestone. In Scotland they are called dykes, and in Galloway the article describes single large boulders, in volcanic and igneous stone. In Cornwall and Wales the walls are, according to the same table, stone-faced earth banks, called a Cornish hedge and a clawdd. It also says longer, flatter stones allow regular coursing, wall-heads, lintels and stiles. Random construction predominates in the west and north.
Our reading is that stone decides style. Flat, bedded rock gives courses. Rounded boulders give something else. We have not found a source that states the principle outright.
The small holes
Wikipedia lists passages built into walls. Bolt holes, also called smoots, are small passages up to 200 millimetres high. Cripple holes are larger, 450 to 600 millimetres. It does not say what each was for, and neither will we.
Who builds them now
Wikipedia says skilled wallers are few in number today. The Dry Stone Walling Association, according to the conservation article, was founded in 1968 by a small group of dykers in south-west Scotland. The Association runs a certification scheme with four grades, from Initial to Master Craftsman, and Wikipedia confirms the grades. The conservation article gives about 1,000 members, among them 250 certified professional wallers, and says the real number of professionals may be anywhere from a few hundred to about 1,000, since many are not registered. It counts 29 Master Craftspeople qualified as examiners and more than 250 students a year working toward the qualifications.
It also describes a Heritage Lottery Fund scheme in 2015 that placed five trainees, aged 19 to 32, in 18-month training in north-west England. Take all of these as figures from a trade article of some years ago, and not as current counts.
A history on a regional association’s site gives a sense of the pace of the work. A waller could build six to eight yards in a day, it says, working 12 to 14 hours. We have kept that as a historical figure, not a benchmark.
The world list
Wikipedia says the art of dry stone walling was inscribed in 2018 on the UNESCO Representative List of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity. The countries it lists for that inscription are France, Greece, Italy, Slovenia, Croatia, Switzerland and Spain, with Ireland added in 2024. Britain is not among them in that list. We have not checked whether a later change affects it.
What to look at
The longest wall named in our sources is the Mourne Wall in County Down, Northern Ireland, which Wikipedia gives as 22 miles, or 35 kilometres. But the useful habit is smaller. Look at the copes. Then look at the wall for the through stones. Then check where the wall has been mended, and how.
Roam first. Shop later.
Wallers, stonemasons and makers working with local stone can find out what’s involved at /sell-with-sephari/