The Lord Lieutenant of Cumbria, James Cropper, has presented the Dry Stone Walling Association\'s highest honour, the Pinnacle Award, to Cumbria County Councillor Tim Heslop at the opening of a permanent \'Sheepfolds\' exhibition in Appleby Heritage Centre.

Replica Awards also go to Andy Goldsworthy, the artist who designed them, and Steven Allen (among others) who helped him build them.

There are 48 of the \'Sheepfold\' sculptures throughout Cumbria, built since 1996, the UK Year of Visual Arts, when Andy Goldsworthy was commissioned by the county council to produce the works.

The Pinnacle Award acknowledges Cumbria County Council\'s foresight in commissioning the work and the East Cumbria Countryside Project for managing the building programme. It also commends Andy Goldsmith, whose creative vision conceived these striking landscape sculptures, lead waller Steve Allen and the other dry stone wallers without whom the sculptures could not have been built.

The Dry Stone Walling Association\'s chairman, Paul Webley, said: "The Sheepfolds project display the skills of the wallers in lasting landscape features which will show the public that the craft of building in natural stone goes far beyond the ordinary field walls that are themselves a vital part of Britain\'s upland landscape."

The works of art reflect on man\'s use of the landscape, the passage of time and memory and appear at locations varying from remote fellsides to a site alongside the M6.

Accepting the Pinnacle Award on behalf of the council, Tim Heslop said: "We are delighted that the \'Sheepfolds\' project, which is a magnificent work of art, has also been recognised by the experts in the field as a superb example of the craft of dry stone walling. It reinforces the recognition of Cumbria\'s high quality landscape as unique."

He praised the dry stone wallers involved in the project. "Cumbria has some of the finest wallers in Britain," he said, "including Steven Allen from the Eden Valley who led the team which realised Andy Goldsworthy\'s ideas.