DAVID CRAIG

The rebuilt fold at Melmerby is unusual in several ways. For one thing, it is a washfold, where sheep were cleaned in the beck. Secondly, there are not one but two stone pens making up the whole fold. And thirdly, Andy Goldsworthy has placed beside it a new stone sculpture of a special kind.

The village green, on the road from Penrith to Alston, used to be thronged with geese and as many as fifty horses. All village farms had grazing rights. The oldest man in Melmerby, Fred Teesdale at the Old Rectory, remembers the fold in use in the 1920s: ‘They dunked the sheep into t’water on their backs and they puddled them round wi a long pole. They got onto their feet again, where t’road is, and they shook theirsels dry.’ By 1936, a photograph of the local maypole dance shows that the fold was derelict.

The beck was swelled for the job of washing by slotting larch planks into the parapets of the footbridge immediately below the fold. Says Fred, ‘We used to take delight in taking boards away and letting water out.’ Now this planking can be done again, with the refurbishment of the bridge. When the water level is raised, it laps round the sculpture that has been placed on the shingle at the verge of the water. Goldsworthy has sliced a block of Permian New Red Sandstone into five, cutting at right angles to the quarrymen’s drill-holes. He has made a deep hole that tapers down through the layers of stone. This fills like a well as the water rises.

The green at Melmerby is a beautiful lush heart to the village, and it’s even more interesting now with these stoneworks, both new and re-created. Many people in the community have lent their energy to their completion: Linda Robinson, Chair of the Green Management Committee; Rob Orchard, its Clerk; Sheila Orchard, Clerk to the Parish Council; Geoff Falkender, archaeologist, who found the 1936 photograph; and Anne Rowley of Glassonby, who owns the land. The rebuilding of the fold walls, by Steve Allen of Tebay and George Allonby of Penrith, includes the tall palisade along the waterside. As Fred Teesdale says, ‘When you look at that wall end-on, it’s got a slight cant on, and it’s the same all t’way. It’s rather a masterpiece, is that.’