CROSS CURRICULAR STUDIES - FOUR

Wall building or dyking has its own language and jargon which can provide an interesting and unusual source of vocabulary enrichment in ENGLISH. The act of wall building is about 'stripping out', 'stints', 'first or second lifts', 'coverbands', 'coping' and 'wallheads'. There are fascinating local variations in the words used to name parts of a wall or sheepfold including, 'copes' or 'coping stones', also called 'cams', 'tops' or 'toppers'; a 'cripple hole', which allows smaller animals to pass through a wall but can also be called a 'lunky', 'luckie', 'lonky', 'hogghole', 'smoot', 'thawl' or 'thirl'; 'hearting' or 'filling', which is the in-fill rubble within a wall; the different types of walls themselves, 'double dykes', 'clearance walls' or 'accretion walls'; or the words used to describe the functions of sheepfolds 'pinfolds', 'washfolds', 'stells', and 'bields'.(8)

Knowledge of these technical terms can provide a wonderful descriptive vocabulary to inform creative written work, as in this example by the West Cumbrian poet Norman Nicholson: (9) (Reproduced by kind permission of the trustees of Norman Nicholson).

Wall
The wall walks the fell -
Grey millipede on slow
Stone hooves;
Its slack back hollowed
At gulleys and grooves,
Or shouldering over
Old boulders
Too big to be rolled away.
Fallen fragments
Of the high crags
Crawl in the walk of the wall.

A dry-stone wall
Is a wall and a wall,
Leaning together
(Cumberland-and-Westmorland
Champion wrestlers),
Greening and weathering,
Flank by flank,
With filling of rubble
Between the two -
A double-rank
Stone dyke:
Flags and through-
stones jutting out sideways,
Like the steps of a stile.

A wall walks slowly,
At each give of the ground,
Each creak of the rock’s ribs,
It puts its foot gingerly,
Arches its hog-holes,
Lets cobble and knee-joint
Settle and grip.
As the slipping fellside
Erodes and drifts,
The wall shifts with it,
Is always on the move.

They built a wall slowly,
A day a week;
Built it to stand,
But not stand still.
They built a wall to walk.