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