Wensleydale, Yorkshire Dales National Park, North Yorkshire, England

© Guy Edwardes/Minden Picture

Info. Wensleydale, Yorkshire Dales National Park, North Yorkshire, England

Wensleydale is part of the Yorkshire Dales in Northern England. The valley is home to historic villages, waterfalls, castles and lots of green hills for walkers to explore. But this beautiful corner of Yorkshire is best known for its local Wensleydale cheese, made famous by the British clay animation franchise 'Wallace & Gromit'. It was a favourite cheese of the cartoon duo, which helped boost sales around the world – some even credit Wallace and his dog Gromit for saving the cheese company from bankruptcy.

As well as cheese, another distinctive feature in Wensleydale, and the British countryside, are the dry stone walls that have crisscrossed the landscape for centuries. There are over 8,000 kilometres of these walls in the Yorkshire Dales National Park. They appear in lots of photographs like our one, but they are not for decoration. The walls were built by farmers to mark pieces of land and to stop their cows and sheep from wandering off. The walls are 'dry' because they were built with no mortar to bind the stones together. A well-built dry stone wall can last over 100 years.