Ah, the wonders of dry-stone walls. This one in Bransdale is quite remarkable, though to many an eye, it might be just a very large pile of stones. Compare it to the more modest wall on the other side of the track, then maybe you’ll be as impressed as I am. It is well-built, you must give it that. The lower half does the serious work as a retaining wall, while the upper half is a single skin, in keeping with local tradition. Here you can see daylight through the gaps, which is, I am told, a feature rather than a flaw of Bransdale walls.
The real question, of course, is why. Why go to all this trouble and expense for a wall along what is, let us be honest, a fairly unremarkable farm track? Perhaps the Earl of Feversham was particular about aesthetics, or perhaps he simply needed to keep his men busy when there were no game birds to shoot.
Further up the track, the land hints at its story. A deeply sunken holloway zigzags its way up the nose of Cockayne Ridge, the scars of centuries of heavy use. The ridge itself slices Bransdale in two, and both flanking ridges carry the ghostly remains of medieval roads, trodden by generations of travellers. To the west, there is Thurkilsti, mentioned in a land grant from 1145. A similar road once ran along Rudland Rigg to the east, both little improved since their medieval heyday.
These old roads would have been alive with the clatter of hooves, the creak of pannier-laden carts, and the occasional four-wheeled ox-wagon struggling through the mud. Livestock too would have trudged along them, as the ruts deepened and the roads spread into broad, braided scars on the landscape.
Moorland travel was, and still is, a game of navigation through mist and snow. Hence the liberal scattering of stone waymarkers, many doubling as boundary stones. Some, like Cockan Cross, have later acquired helpful inscriptions to direct the hapless traveller. Others, such as the guidepost on the Thurkilsti track, have been pointing the way to “Stoxla” and “Helmsla” since 1712—positively modern in comparison. Some even perch on ancient burial mounds, because apparently, nothing says “navigation aid” quite like a prehistoric grave.
So, it seems the main routes to Stokesley and points north ran along the ridges, and those heading that way would naturally have climbed up to join them. But why, then, was the track up Cockayne Ridge so well-worn that it became so deeply sunken?
One reason could be its role as a droveway—or should that be driveway?—moving cattle up to summer grazing. Another possibility is that it was a turf-road, a route for bringing down fuel cut from the moors. Peat cutting was a prized right, and once cut into bricks, the peat would be left to dry before being transported. The preferred vehicle for this arduous task was a horse-drawn sled, which—unsurprisingly—did little to preserve the track beneath it.
After the peat had dried, Bransdale’s farmers engaged in their own particular method of stacking, because even something as simple as drying fuel apparently warranted regional variations. Then, after the hay had been gathered, they would begin the joyous task of dragging the sleds loaded with the peat down the hillside, leaving erosion in their wake.
And so, over centuries, this track was worn down into the deep holloway we can see today and which the Earl of Feversham perhaps took objection to. All of which is fascinating, if one has a particular interest in the precise ways in which humans and their livestock have trampled the landscape into submission.
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