Rough Sike Wall

This is a tale about a wall, mist and mizzle, midges, mud, and midsummer sun. It's set at Moor House, seven miles out of Garrigill in South Tynedale, at 1800 feet. It is remote, taking up to an hour to get to from the NNR base at Widdybank in Teesdale.

Walls fall down for lots of reasons; this one had collapsed because the ground had given way.

Built of limestone onto a limestone substrate you'd think this would be a sound base to build on, but limestone weathers and dissolves. Sometime in the past part of the side of the gorge had dropped out, the big slabs of rock now at the bottom lining the bank of Rough Sike. Trickling water, the action of frost, and gravity had left an unstable edge, with the ground on the field side higher than that on the stream side, which drops steeply to the water. The line of the wall would have to be moved into the field.

You look at the stone as you strip out the wall: big pieces of limestone, weirdly eroded shapes, smooth and hard slabs, jagged and angular stuff, blocks which fall apart in your hands as you lift them, lots of small contorted pieces which you might stretch definition to describe as 'flat' - ish. They are full of fossils from the Carboniferous deltas and seas, crinoids and corals, curved wisps of brachiopods, all kinds of squiggles, pale traces of their origin.

Five pairs of hands - Pete, Carl, Gordon, John, and Emma our NNR Trainee - shift the tumble down wall into a pile of stone roughly sorted into facings, hearting and throughstones. I drop down slope on the Sike side to throw up the stone scattered down the bank and in the gorge, a slow, energetic task. The big stuff - mainly throughs (or 'thruffs' as they are known locally) and foundation stones - have to be rolled up and heaved over the line of the wall onto the parallel stone pile expanding rapidly within the field. Anything big and knobbly is put aside as potential copes, or capping stones, which are just weights to compress and hold together the carefully placed stones beneath . The prospect is interesting - one enormous mound of material and a straggly line of foundation stones, all tilted (some outwards, some inwards, but none level), and in places seemingly none at all, just a jumble of soil and small stone.

The first day. Pete and I stand looking at the big gap, with its erupted, impacted teeth sticking out of the ground. It's all a bit daunting. We've brought a mattock, a spade, a pinch bar, a lump hammer, a walling hammer, two batter frames, a line level, and a ball of string. We eye the line of the wall about two feet in from its original position and set up our strings. And starting at the lower end, we dig and scrape.

Out comes an assortment of stone, some big founds and a lot of dross along with a deep brown damp soil.

On the field side, because the ground is so soft and uneven, we go down more than the usual six inches for the foundation trench, sometimes as much as a foot, so we end up with a sizeable excavation. Into this we lay the first big stones, and as we work uphill we step them, the one above lipping over the one below, packing big hearting tightly into the space left between the two rows, though most are touching back to back.

An occasional monster is left in place, perhaps nudged slightly into line with the heavy bar. Halfway up the slope we dig quickly to the bedrock, and use some well positioned jutting outcrops for our next steps. Getting the footings right is the first key to the strength of the wall, and makes subsequent building easier (that's the theory anyway). It eventually takes the two of us three days to set these steps in place. It's going to be a slow wall.

On to these steps we build the first courses. Pete works on the inside (field side) and I work on a thin strip on the Sike side. All the stone for this outer face has to be brought over from the pile in the field. The idea is to work up the slope using the levelled strings and the batter frames (which give a truncated A shape to the wall in cross section) to guide the placing of the stone. At any one time the top of the wall down slope will level into the foundation of the wall several feet up slope. You hop up bit by bit. The stones are placed tight, length in, carefully chocked, and well packed with hearting - the heart of the wall is just that, as key to its strength as well set foundations.

To get the wall rising we have a day of many hands and it's cool, breezy, grey; the beginning of July.

Then Pete and I crack on in days of sun and mist and midges. We lose ourselves in the task, time passes quickly, the wall emerges, shuffling slowly uphill.

It is lunchtime. We sit across the water for our sandwiches, resting on a soft grassy bank looking back towards our nascent wall.

Cut back into the bank we are sitting on, is a very small quarry, grassed over, but still with some big blocks of stone evident in a jumbled pile, and a scatter of shims half grassed over. This is probably the source of the stone for the wall, which, if right, is odd. It would mean that the quarried stone had been carried over the water and up the bank on the other side. An unusual, labour intense way of getting stone to the wall. Usually the source is uphill from where the wall is to be; it's a lot easier to bring stone down than to take it up. But here the obvious place where stone could be got was by working into the side of the gorge where it began to open out.

The July sun stretches into August and is hot, warming the rising wall and the reducing stone heap.

Some days there's a breeze, on others it's stiflingly calm. Midges ignore the general rule and rise in sun and wind and rain. Chemical repellent is sloshed on to little effect. Nothing can be done when there are tens of little tickling bites on face and neck and arms as you carefully pick your way across the slope with a big stone clamped to your belly.

There are days of mist and mizzle when we don't see much, and hear only our own working.

A hammer is used hardly at all, but when I need to knock off a knuckle ('knapping') to fit a stone tightly with its neighbours, it's the smell as much as the sound that I notice. The sound can be a dull, solid clunk or an ear-piercing ring, as if striking metal. The smell is of rotting vegetation; equatorial swamp immediately hits your nose. We are sweaty or cold, or both at once.

And when it rains it's wellies and waterproofs - and mud, glorious mud!

The wall creeps up the slope, some days just one of us building, sometimes two. Gordon becomes a nimble collector and packer of hearting.

At about knee height the first course of thruffs goes in, binding the two faces of the wall below and providing a solid base for the second rise of the wall. Some of these through stones are monstrous pieces, sculpted on one side, more level on the other, so are probably the tops of clints that have been scalped. A wall end or cheek is built at both the top and bottom - at the bottom to hold the wall over the winter above the gap we'll leave until next year, when the next higgledy section of wall is taken down and rebuilt.

At the top, the cheek will prevent the rebuilt wall from being torn out by the inevitable collapse of the ragged, folded-in pile of stones just above it.

We notice the birds. On the way in, kestrels and a merlin plus there's usually a wheatear bobbing around just below us on the flat ground where Rough Sike flows into Moss Burn. A wren flits through the gaps in the stones of the old wall. The pink of the thyme which grows in profusion along the trackside becomes patchy, but the heather purples up, just as the deep red of the cotton grass begins to glow. Wavy-in-the-breeze grass heads turn light brown, buff, set against the vivid greens of rushes and mosses. Nearly all the meadow flowers have set their seed, so now it's the bright green of alchemilla leaves that catch the eye. What we look at when we lift our heads from the wall is a soft palette of moorland colours.

The work is intermittent, a day or two days (half days, really) a week over summer and into autumn, but suddenly the gap at the upper end is about to close, with the top of the wall easing up on a second layer of throughs giving a gentle line to catch the slope.

Finally, the copes go on, packed and wedged to hold everything together.

It's the final test of the waller's arms and back, to get these weights on!

And so it's done, until the next bit of wall falls out. Just over ten metres rebuilt in twelve half days - a slow wall.

All that remains is to clear the unused stone down to a pile where the gap remains at the bottom - to be built up next year. And as it was in the beginning - misty, wet - so it is at the end, the rain just starting as we clear the ground...