Westerdale

At New House Farm Westerdale, I found this interesting wall.
Single width stone but with some incredibly long copes neatly levelled off.  My spade (for scale)  has a long handle making the wall here near six foot tall.

There were numerous walls on the farm with copes of differing length, but non as extreme as this.

The only other similar wall I've seen in the North York Moors is this one at Commondale

First Hedge laying of 2013

1st of September - start of Countryside Stewardship rules for hedge laying, saw me eagerly cutting & laying my first hedge of the season at Low Askew near Cropton.  "Lovely", I thought as I'm often doing this in the freezing wet of darkest winter.  But it was too warm at around 18c and in just a T-shirt I was getting rather too many thorns in my arms for my liking.  The owner didn't want me to remove the fencing, which made me a little apprehensive as I didn't think I'd have enough  room  to work.  But it turned out I had plenty of room and as I only had two small corridors either side of the mixed species hedge to work in I didn't keep loosing my tools as often happens.  An added pleasure were the several buzzards flying around.

 Same location, different hedge.

A length of hedge following laying.

The same hedge one year later on.

Early summer growth one year on.

Regrowth from a newly laid hedge (Low Askew)








(Below).  This is how narrow a Yorkshire style hedge should be laid.

Yorkishire style!  Narrow!!

Whitby Abbey

  

When Henry the 8th got rid of many religious institutions in the 1500s many buildings such as our abbey fell into disuse and their stone was recycled into buildings and walls.

And here we have a rather deliberate attempt to reuse some of the old cut and shaped stones.  You don't often see architectural features in walls so I was pleased I'd spotted this one.

Julian Park - Medieval Wall

This old medieval wall is supposed to be a park wall, once an enclosure for deer.  However on closer inspection the ditch, which would have given it greater hight is on the outside of the enclosed area.  

Julian Park is 3km West of Goathland in grid square NZ 8000

Scottish Walls

On one of my annual climbing trips to the highlands I spotted these two examples:-

 The wall above is in the forest at Aviemore.  Typically it has a slightly overhanging cope.

This one is a relatively new wall at the western end of Aviemore.  The stone is mostly Granite with copes and throughs of another blacker rock which I think is schist and is quite slabby, so it'd make better throughs than the granite.

Extreme Hedgelaying

 The hedge I'd been laying now covered in a foot or so of snow.  But I wasn't going to give up.

 Back to the car for the shovel.

A little bit of digging and we're able to start.  But then I got sensible and went home.