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

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.

The bulge -Sunnyside farm, Fylingthorpe.

Alarming bulge and over a private road entrance & public footpath.

The stick was holding it up!!!

And after about a day and a half - here's the result

Pleased with this.

Local Copes

This wall is part of a boundary for Swallow Farm near Fylingthorpe and is not far from the historic park wall. What is unusual is the cope is the only example I've come across of this kind of cope which consists of large upright copes placed regularily amongst normal copes. These uprights contain both holes and notched stones. Initially i thought the notched holes were simply broken holes but now believe that the holes were for trimmed lengths of timber to go into and the notches would have held any untrimmed lengths of wood such as hazel in place. Or could it simply have been for victorian wire?

North Yorks Moors Walls

Left - Limestone wall, Wykham on the Southern Escarpment of the NYMNP

Walls on the North Yorkshire moors can be divided into two styles.
a) Double wall, which as the picture lower  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