The Face on the Wall

The Face on the Wall used to be fun to find when I was a kid and was often visited on a once popular walk from Rivington village, down along the Dean Brook and round the Yarrow reservoir.

The face was on one of the capping stones of the surrounding walls of the reservoir, near to the overflow. It is reckoned to have been carved by the workers building the reservoir and it does seemed to be shaped to fit exactly on the edge of a stone of similar size and shape to the others. That is to say it seems to have been carved to fit the wall. I think the last time I saw the face intact was in the late 1980s or perhaps 1990. You’d forget to look for it, or walk along the shoreline rather than the path, that and exploring new areas elsewhere.

If I recall correctly it was in the early to mid 90s when I saw the face had been smashed, most of one-half had been sheered off, although I can’t recall if the rock was so obviously split into pieces as it is today, maybe it was cracked but hadn’t come apart. You could see the brighter, fresh rock where the pieced were missing, the rest having a dark coloured patina with green lychen on top.

It was quite shocking and not at all like vandalising a bus shelter with a marker pen. This is real historic shit, not the plastic stuff you’re supposed to rebel against. I guess an adult wouldn’t have done it, so it must have been a kid like me. It was the first time I noticed people didn’t care about some stuff I thought was important. The second time was shortly after when I tried to tell people about it. I remember about a couple of years later there was something in a local paper, like other stuff it seemed to take a while for anyone with a voice to notice. Anyway, enough of my ranting about the bad old days, before the internet and organised trolling :P

It was removed for some time to the Tourist Info place next to the Great House Barn, but is back in place now, I reckon in exactly the same place as it was, except a few of the adjacent stones seem to have been swapped around.

The face was certainly from the time of the reservoir wall construction, same size and shape in general as the other top-stones of the wall, same patina all over and almost certainly the same type of rock. The reservoir and walls are shown completed on the c1892 OS map so we can imagine the face to be in place by then, the reservoir itself was said to be completed by 1857, perhaps it was the last stone to be laid in the wall. Yarrow was the last of the “Rivington” reservoirs to be constructed.