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Chapter One

The Ground Beneath Our Feet

Dry Stone Walling

Shepley, West Yorkshire

All is quiet on the farm. The tractors are idle and the sheep are dozing. As a sunless dawn breaks across the Yorkshire sky, a small troupe of starlings dances a murmuration in the ­half-­light.

A silver ­pickup truck emerges through the mist, rumbles up the slope, and parks at the top of the hill. Two ­dark-­clothed figures, their heads hooded, climb out of the vehicle and slam the doors behind them. They remove hammers and crowbars from the boot, then carry them through a gate into the next field, where part of a wall has collapsed in the winter storms.

No one knows exactly how old the wall ­is—only that it’s been standing here for centuries, dividing one plot of land from another, containing countless generations of sheep. It draws an imperfect rectangle across the countryside, running ­north­east along a ridge, plunging into a valley, turning left at a dell, following a footpath, skipping over a stile, then climbing back to where it started.

The ­wallers—a brother and sister who live just across the ­valley—circle the structure and assess its condition. As they debate the best way to repair it, their words curdle into steam and dissolve in the cold air. Then the work begins.

They start by removing the remaining stones, sorting them by size and function, and tossing them into separate piles. As they dismantle the wall, all kinds of creatures escape from the shadows: Spiders scuttle into the debris, worms writhe into the mud, and two tired toads waddle off across the grass. At one point they uncover a colony of sleeping peacock butterflies, which they collect in cupped hands and ­resettle a few yards down the slope. None of them wakes.

The weather deteriorates as the morning goes on. By 9 a.m. the breeze has become a gale, shaking the trees and hurtling dark clouds across the sky. At 9:20 the rain rolls in off the Pennines in ­near-­horizontal waves, smudging the fields and veiling the hills in gray.

The wallers toil through the morning as the wind rattles their waterproofs and the rain stings their skin. They move like two clockwork machines, bending down, standing up, leaning over, again and again, hour after hour. Yet there is nothing mindless about their work: every decision matters, every stone counts. They rummage through the rubble, looking for the next piece in the puzzle, turning it over in their hands, inspecting it from every angle, then laying it carefully beside its neighbors. They work wordlessly, methodically, ascending in increments: footers, first lift, ­through-­stones, second lift, toppings.

By the end of the day, as darkness again descends on Yorkshire, the siblings have moved ten metric tons of stone by hand and built a wall that, with luck, will still be standing in two hundred years.

***

About 6,000 years ago a band of European migrants crossed the Channel to Britain. They came in small boats that pitched and rolled in the waves. Some probably didn’t survive the journey, but those who did went on to colonize their new home with remarkable thoroughness, from the swampy lowlands of southern England to the ­wind-­pummelled islands of the Outer Hebrides.

There is much we don’t know about these “Neolithic” people, but they undoubtedly had a genius for craftsmanship. They wove intricate baskets from reed and willow, produced the first-­ever pottery on the British Isles, and made stone tools whose polished surfaces continue to shine like new. Long before the idea of a pyramid glinted in an Egyptian eye, they were building stone monuments so large and sophisticated that we still can’t comprehend how they did it.

The most significant Neolithic innovation was agriculture. Before their arrival the British Isles were inhabited by ­hunter-­gatherers who roved the ­tree-­thick landscapes in search of wild food. Their Neolithic successors, by contrast, were farmers: They came here with seed wheat and barley, as well as sheep, goats, pigs, and cows, which they somehow transported across the Channel. They slashed and burned their way through the wildwoods, converting ancient forests into the first fields. Then they did something that had probably never been done before, and which to their nomadic predecessors would have seemed utterly bizarre. As they prepared the land for cultivation they gathered loose rocks, carried them to the edges of their fields, and started building walls.

Most Neolithic walls vanished long ago, but in a handful of unspoiled ­places—places so remote and barren that few have since dared inhabit ­them—the traces of slightly later Bronze Age walls just about remain. In Dartmoor (which is only a moor because prehistoric farmers ­clear-­felled its oak forests), the remains of ancient stone boundaries scribble miles of ­etch-­a-­sketch patterns through grass and gorse. These structures, known locally as “reaves,” were originally capped by walls of native granite, before time, weather, and gravity (not to mention pilfering masons of later centuries) reduced them to low rubbly ridges that in places are now virtually invisible.

They are evidence that thousands of years before the Romans built Hadrian’s Wall, our predecessors were working with natural stone to ­reshape and organize their landscapes.

The story of dry stone walling is the story of farming. These two ancient practices are so interdependent that they are all but unimaginable without each other. Dry stone walls (called “dry” because of their lack of mortar) were initially built by farmers themselves and served several agricultural functions, the most important being the enclosure of livestock: shielding them from potentially fatal weather and keeping their insatia­ble mouths off valuable crops. We often assume that Britain’s existing field boundaries evolved organically over the cen­tu­ries as crofters, smallholders, shepherds, and graziers agreed upon the patchwork plots that make up our countryside. The truth is rather less charming. The vast majority of surviving dry stone walls are not ancient but modern, and were built in a brief, intense burst of activity as part of an aristocratic ­land grab.

If you had squelched your way along the highways and byways of medieval England, dodging ­dung-­carts and bandits as you went, the countryside would have looked far less enclosed than it does today. That’s because our predecessors’ notion of property was very different from our own. Though land was nominally owned by aristocrats, usually in the name of the Crown, it was in practice a widely accessible resource. There were of course some boundaries: You’d have seen hedges and ditches, wattle fences and hurdle gates. If you’d made it up to Yorkshire’s hill farms you might have spotted imposing walls designed to prevent wolves (before they were hunted to extinction) from reaching the sheep within. Most of Britain’s landscapes, however, were open. Peasants worked ­side by side in large communal fields, hay meadows stretched as far as the eye could see, while livestock nonchalantly rambled through common pastures, woodlands, and country lanes.

Toward the end of the Middle Ages, in part because of the booming wool industry, attitudes changed. As manorial lords came to appreciate the enormous value of agricultural land, they began to expand, consolidate, and enclose their holdings. They bribed, bullied, blackmailed, and negotiated, paying off neighbors, lobbying local courts, and ultimately petitioning Parliament to evict their peasant farmers and convert open fields and common pastures into private farmland. As soon as the agreements were complete, they raised fences, laid hedges, and built walls around their land, not simply to divide arable fields from pasture or livestock from predators, but to mark out parts of their now exclusive estates. Between 1604 and 1914, more than 5,000 Acts of Parliament converted 6.8 million ­acres—about a fifth of England’s total ­area—from “public” land into private property.

It is difficult to overstate the historical importance of the Enclosures. Some argue that they liberated landowners to improve and modernize their farming methods, leading to increased agricultural productivity and wider economic growth. Others maintain that they displaced and dispossessed entire rural communities, hollowing out the countryside, entrenching disparities of wealth, and producing a nation in which, even today, half of all land is owned by just 1 percent of the population. But there is one thing about which no one disagrees. The Enclosures, more perhaps than any other historical process, created the British countryside as we know it, in all its patchwork beauty.