The Family Challenge: dry stone walling
The family
I've always had a thing about dry stone walls. Read Alfred Wainwright's guides to the Lake District fells and you will find many eulogies to the unknown craftsmen who erected them over the centuries. But without mortar, how do they stay up? Trawling the internet and discovering a weekend dry stone walling course, it seems like a great excuse for a weekend in the Lakes. But will my wife, Nicola, nine-year-old, Lola, and seven-year-old, Nell, share my love of northern rock?
The training
We find ourselves among a dozen people standing in front of a dry stone wall, beneath the exquisite backdrop of the screes and peaks of the Langdale Pikes.
Our instructor is Andrew Loudon, a former carpenter from Manchester who is now an expert stonewaller. He has built walls everywhere from the Lakes to Hampstead, north London, and the United States, won several walling competitions and built stone features for the Chelsea flower show.
"These stones can bite," he warns, before giving us a choice of gloves or no gloves. Andrew prefers to get his hands dirty and I opt to do the same, wanting to feel at one with the ancient volcanic rocks.
Then we divide into two teams, one either side of the wall, and start to dismantle a 5m section that is suffering from bulges. Between the two sets of face stones is the packing, a jumble of small filler rocks. They are completely dry and give off the whiff of cordite, caused by a chemical reaction from the stones touching each other.
Some of the walls in Cumbria were built in the 12th century, the higher ones on the fells as late as the Napoleonic wars. Has Andrew ever found any artefacts inside the walls? "The best thing I ever found was a crisp packet with a competition for the Olympics on the back. I did once find a knuckle joint - animal, not human - in the wall every seven metres. It was where the waller had stopped to have his lunch each day."
The kids enjoy stacking the packing stones in a pile as we dismantle the wall level by level, the bigger stones coming from the foundations. They even find a shocked toad. After a couple of hours we have a dismantled wall on the grass and little idea how to reassemble it. The children have lost interest in the dismantling, instead going to a separate pile of stones and creating their own circular lamb enclosure.
After lunch we get to work rebuilding the wall from the jumbled pile of stones at our feet. Andrew has stuck reinforcing bars into the ground at either end of the existing wall and tied a piece of string between them so we can build straight - "Your wall should be twice as wide at the bottom than at the top."
"They should do this on The Apprentice," suggests Nicola.
Our wall is making progress. Andrew moves the string up with each level. By the end of the afternoon, we're placing the top stones on our new wall. My hands are scuffed, scoured and dirty but there's a sense of achievement in our group. Not so for Nell, who complains loudly that the wallers have dismantled her lamb shelter to add to the packing. We promise her a new shelter tomorrow.
Our wall even looks quite straight, and tapers at the top. "Not bad," says Andrew. We celebrate in the Old Dungeon Ghyll hotel with a pint and a packet of crisps for the kids.
Going solo
The next day, we return to break down and reassemble another section. The morning rain results in numerous worms emerging to amuse the girls.
"Andrew says the last time someone touched these rocks was 300 years ago," I tell my daughters.
"Cool," says Lola.
They soon tire of dismantling the wall, though, and so, with permission, set off to scale Side Pike, with instructions to keep us in sight. An hour later, they return, exhilarated at having scaled a 360m hill - "Daddy, we climbed a mountain!"
To enthuse our children, Andrew suggests we place a time capsule inside the wall. Lola writes "My name is Lola and I know about climate change" followed by the date and our names. Nell draws a picture of herself building the wall and writes, "My name is Nell and I am the best artist."
They put both notes inside a plastic water bottle and stick it in the wall for some future Time Team types to discover. Soon we've rebuilt the wall again. A car full of tourists stops to take our picture. "There's nowt to it really, it's just stacking stones," says Andrew. For us, it feels like we've created a sculpture worthy of Andy Goldsworthy.
On the bus back to Ambleside, we're still discussing our stone love. "I liked the way you put the baby rocks in the middle," says Lola. "It was a little bit interesting," says a tactful Nell. Meanwhile, Nicola is gazing out of the window with a poetic air.
"That's a lovely top," she sighs.
"Yes, I've always loved the Langdale Pikes."
"No, not the Pikes, the wall we're driving past!"
Your turn
Andrew Loudon's next dry stone walling courses are on June 14-15 and Sept 13-15 in the Lake District. Visit drystone-walling.co.uk, email info@drystone-walling.co.uk or call 015394 41985. The cost is £100 plus VAT per adult, under-16s free. For other areas, visit the Dry Stone Walling Association of Great Britain, dswa.org.uk
· Pete May's latest book There's A Hippo In My Cistern is published by Collins on June 2, at £7.99