I spent sometime last weekend taking a closer look at the dry stone walls and their condition. The good news is that the ones on the roadside are in reasonable shape. The bad news is that the rest are in various different conditions – most of them not good. And there is a lot! Probably 150-200M of wall that needs to be completely rebuilt and maybe another 50M that needs to be repaired.
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| Dry stone walls in various states of decay |
The images above (all from around the property) give some clues about the task at hand. Pretty daunting. It is difficult to know where to start.
I reckon that some of the walls that in better condition date from around the time of the enclosure acts (1845-1880). However, some of the other walls (e.g. top most left image above) show up on the 1788 map and barely qualify as a wall. So they are at least another 100 years older. They almost look like a field boundary where the stones have been piled up at the edge of the field as the fields were ploughed.
With a bit of practise (remembering that I have only done a weekend course on dry stone walling), I reckon I might be able to do a metre per day. With a 150M, that is a lot of days!