Fences and gates

In our ramblings—and our many times getting lost—we became very familiar with fences and gates. On our Mountain Goat tour, I learned that the stacked stone fences can last 300 years, which means my Regency characters could have leaned against the very fences I was looking at—if my characters were real, of course. People used whatever stones were available, so if the stones had been tumbled around by a river, they were round. If they came straight from the ground, they were flat.

Here’s a fence with mostly rounded stones.

And here’s one where I’d say the stones are mostly flat.

Here’s a longer view of the flat-stone fence.

I even got some pictures of fences that had fallen down.

If you’ve got a fence, you need a way to get to the other side of it. You can go over it via a stile. (This was on Wansfell Pike.)

Or maybe you can go under it.

I’m not sure what this is, really. I did peek inside and this is what I saw.

Mostly we went through fences via a gate. There were a variety of gate types. Here is the one that got us into Levens Park, but from the park side. It was less noticeable from the highway side.

Here’s Mr. M posing so you can see how narrow the opening is.

A large, farm-style gate was relatively common. Sometimes they had a latch, but other times they closed with just a piece of rope to loop over the fence post.

A common gate—and rather ingenious, I thought—that I hadn’t seen before was one that required you to step through an opening into a box kind of arrangement and then swing the gate so that it closed up that opening and opened the other to exit. Here’s a picture that might make it clearer.

The gate is on the right. Sometimes with a backpack and camera, it was a bit of a tight fit to stand in the box area and swing the gate into the other position.

We saw an odd structure on one of our long rambles that looked like a fence across a stream. I couldn’t figure out what it was for—to corral the fish? But they could just swim through.

I asked our guide on the Mountain Goat tour, and he said it was to keep the sheep from wandering.

Here’s another that you can clearly see is part of a fence.