Setting out for a walk on the moors is one of the great pleasures of living in the Calder Valley. The upland landscape has a touch of wildness, with its tracts of heather and tussocky grass. Sometimes you can ramble all day without seeing anyone - but you are never far from a dry-stone wall. Some of them may be falling down, but the way they scribe the moors with their straight lines makes you wonder about the men who built them, and why they are there.

Walking books can guide you along the many paths and bridleways that criss-cross the hills, but this book aims to do something different: to look at the events of two hundred years ago that helped to shape the landscape we see now. In 1814 and 1815 parliamentary Acts ordered the enclosure of common land in Ovenden and Stansfield. An exploration of contemporary documents and maps uncovers a story of debates and disagreements, opportunism and philanthropy that made permanent marks not just on the hills but on the urban landscape too.