I stood and watched him awhile and finally asked him why he was standing out in a cold rain rebuilding the wall. He looked at me with that special pained look Yorkshire farmers save for onlookers and other morons and said: ‘Because it’s fallen down, of course.’ From this I learned, first of all, never to ask a Yorkshire farmer any question that can’t be answered with ‘pint of Tetley’s’ and that one of the primary reasons so much of the British landscape is so unutterably lovely and timeless is that most farmers, for whatever reason, take the trouble to keep it that way.
