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That was three years ago. Since then I have rebuilt the whole of the collapsed wall behind the cottage, working a few hours at a time on summer evenings and at weekends. It took far longer than the course had led me to expect, largely because I was working alone and had nobody to tell me when a stone was in the wrong place.

The basic rule, Owen explained, is 'one over two, two over one': every stone should sit across the joint between the two stones beneath it, just as bricks do in a house wall. Break that rule, and you create a weak vertical line that will eventually give way. It sounds simple. In practice, with stones of every conceivable shape, it requires constant judgement.

There were eight of us on the course, gathered in a farmyard at nine o'clock on the Saturday morning: a retired dentist, two sisters who had bought a farm together, a young couple from Leeds and a forester who said very little all day. Our instructor, Owen, was a short, broad man in his sixties who had been building walls since he left school.

The walls that criss-cross the Dales are mostly more than two hundred years old. They were built when open land was divided into fields, often by teams of men who lived in rough huts on the hillside for months at a time, and who left no record of their names.

What surprises me most, looking back, is how much I have come to enjoy the work itself. Walling is slow and repetitive, and there is no way to hurry it. But there is a deep satisfaction in it, too, and the hours pass in a kind of quiet concentration I have rarely found anywhere else.

I said as much to Owen while we ate our sandwiches in the shelter of the barn. He looked at me as if I had suggested painting the stones. 'Half of walling is knowing what you've got,' he said. 'If you don't sort them now, you'll spend all afternoon looking for the right stone, and you'll end up using the wrong one because you're tired of looking.'

By late afternoon on the Sunday, though, I had started to make fewer of my own. I was no longer trying each stone in three different places; more often than not, the first place I tried was the right one. It was not skill, exactly, but it was the beginning of something like it.