There's a noticeable decline in the extent and condition of this important part of the landscape and historic fabric of the county, where agriculture is the dominant land use and around towns. Each area of the county has a distinctive walling fingerprint, which may owe to the availability of stone materials, an explicit design choice (e.g. single estates) or some other factor such as age, cost, maintenance regime, experience of the builder etc. Many of the intact walls are worthy of note and may be implicitly protected, but others in the wider landscape or within designed landsscapes but not in the HES inventory may not be protected. Explicit mention in planning guidance would be a useful acknowledgement of where it would be appropriate to explicitly protect and conserve such features and elsewhere to prioritise restoration, using traditional techniques and to build in better facilities for recreation and access, where they present significant obstacles to reasonable public access.
Landscape
