Life on the hedge

The modern hedgelayer's role is no longer that of a fencer, but instead a practical conservationist creating vibrant, thorny arteries of hedgerow habitat

- Richard Negus

IT is impossible to say precisely when the first hedge in Britain was laid, yet it is beyond doubt that our hedgerows are the oldest in Europe. This truth came to light in the early 1980s, when archaeologist Francis Pryor and a team from Cambridge unearthed the traces of a hedged-in sheep fold and livestock market in the stark peatlands of Flag Fen near Peterborough, Cambridgeshire.

A nondescript piece of blackened hedgerow brash was exposed, visibly clean cut and angled, indicative of trimming with, one supposes, a billhook. When radiocarbon-dated, this barb helped to prove that some 4,500 years ago, people here were already well-established in agricultural practices familiar to us today-mixed farming, draining land and managing hedgerows.

It stands to reason, then, that if the hedge was integral to this proto-agricultural Bronze Age landscape, then so too were hedge layers.

This belief in my trade's antiquity is no display of hubris, more old-fashioned common sense. The hedge is and always will be a manmade construct, each one planted by human hand to fulfil practical agricultural roles. Then as now, if a hedge is to remain as a hedge, rather than morphing into a linear wood or rambling scrub block, it requires the intervention of man.

Our national hedgerow network is eclectic, reflecting the remarkably localised differences in soil, climate and terrain that determine agricultural land use. The regional styles of hedge-laying, regarded as near art forms by some, only emerged as a result of these sectarian deviations of the land. Before exploring these variations, it is important to first understand what is meant by hedge-laying.

Hedgelaying involves making a partial downwards-angled cut through the basal stem of a hedgerow shrub. The layers of bark, cambium and inner sapwood remain connected to the root stock via the thin tongue left after the clean slash has been made with billhook, axe or chainsaw.