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I found all this maddening at first, not because the rules were hard to understand but because they seemed so rigid. Surely, I argued, the odd stone laid lengthways would not bring the whole thing down. Dennis did not argue back. He simply took me to see a stretch of wall on the edge of the village that someone had repaired a few years earlier, quickly and cheaply.

'That bit will need doing again,' he said at last, 'in about eighty years.' It was, I later learned from his wife, the highest praise he had ever been known to give.

It felt absurd, standing there with my hands in my pockets while the light went. But gradually, and then quite suddenly, it began to work. I would study the space for a minute, see a stone lying three yards away, pick it up, and it would drop into place with a small, satisfying knock. Not every time. But often enough to believe it was not luck.

His terms were simple. I would work alongside him on his own jobs every Saturday for a season, unpaid, and in return he would spend a few days on my wall, showing me where to start. 'You'll hate it for a month,' he said. 'After that you'll either give up or you won't.' I was not sure which of these he was expecting.

Dennis had learnt the craft from his father, who had walled in the dale before him, and he spoke of the old wallers with a reverence usually reserved for saints. He could tell, he claimed, which of them had built a particular stretch simply from the way its top stones had been set.

That was the last time I questioned a rule. It was not quite the end of my frustrations, though. Knowing what to do turned out to be very different from being able to do it, and for weeks my sections of wall looked, in Dennis's phrase, like a pile of stones that had been told to stand up.

Dennis's answer, when I eventually asked, was that a wall is built from the ground up but planned from the pile. If you cannot see at a glance what you have to work with, he said, you will spend the whole day looking for a stone you used an hour ago. The big flat ones go at the bottom; the long ones, the 'throughs', go across the wall at intervals to tie the two faces together; the small irregular stuff is hearting, packed into the middle. Each stone, in other words, already has a job. Sorting is how you find out what it is.

I walked the whole circuit that evening, running my hand along the top stones, and I found I could tell which stretches were mine and which were his without looking. His were smoother somehow, more settled, as though they had been there for a hundred years already. Mine had a slightly anxious look, like a student in a borrowed suit.