The wall was originally built by Charles Waterton to protect the wildlife inside Walton Park. The park is recognised as being the first nature reserve of modern times. Building of the wall around Walton Park began in 1821 and was completed in 1826. The cost - a very sizeable amount in those days - was £9,000. For the relative value of the cost of the construction in 2010 click here.

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'There was now a thick stone barricade, three miles long, and sometimes as much as sixteen feet high, separating the park from the landscape that surrounded it. The wall had taken over four years to build, and had cost Waterton £9,000; money which he could hardly afford, but which said he had saved by not drinking wine all his life.'
(Charles Waterton 1782 - 1865, Traveller & Conservationist, Julia Blackburn, 1989.)

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'His management, or in rigid truth, I ought to say mismanagement of money in any and every form, was unexceptionally anomalous; and, I trust, without incurring severe or even merited censure, I may add, that it was somewhat savouring of the last rather than of the present century. For instance, many years ago, he determined to encircle his park by a very high and substantial stone and mortar wall; but as he himself observed, "I had then no loose cash in my drawer with which to meet so indefinite, and in all human probability, so large an expenditure, and although never reputed to be needle-witted in the aquirement of pounds, shillings and pence, yet I trust that I had sufficient mother wit and inborn honesty in my composition to prevent my ever ordering anything for the payment of which I should have had to borrow the amount; and catch me directing or authorising any thing to be done that I can't pay for." ....... Notwithstanding Mr. Waterton's inaptitude and generally undisciplined mode as regarded the management of money, and its yielding or unyielding business-like returns, yet in detailed expenditure and receipts no one could be more acutely sensitive or accurate.'
Extract from Charles Waterton : His Home, Habits and Handiwork, pp. 293-297, by Richard Hobson, M.D., Cantab., Leeds, MDCCCLXVII, Second, enlarged edition. Published by London: Whittaker & Co., Simpkin, Marshall & Co.. Leeds: H.W. Walker and John Smith. The 1st edition was published in 1866.