Britain, says James Fox, was once a place teeming with bodgers, badgers, ballers, bag women, bottom stainers, fat boys, flashers and flirters. That’s not forgetting the riddlers, slaggers and snobs. And before you say anything, these are all occupations that were once ubiquitous but are now vanishingly rare: a bodger makes chair legs; a badger is someone who etches glass; a fat boy is a greaser of axles in haulage systems, while a snob is a journeyman maker of boots and shoes.
According to the main charity that supports traditional skills, 285 crafts are still practised in Britain, of which more than half are endangered. Seventy-two are on the critical list and it is these, and the people who practise them, that James Fox sets out to record. He meets the Nobles, who are the pre-eminent stone-walling family “in Britain, if not the world”. Mostly they stick close to home, in the West Yorkshire village where they have farmed, and walled, for centuries. Building a dry-stone wall requires an extraordinary kind of embodied knowledge, the sort that knows instinctively how to use gravity, friction and exactly the right-shaped rock to build a structure that allows moorland gales to whistle through and remain standing. Done right, a dry-stone wall will last 200 years, compared with a post-and-wire fence which needs replacing after 20.
