On Hedge Laying
Monday, April 14, 2025
James Rebanks, author of Pastoral Song : A Farmer’s Journey (do read it!), shared this photograph on BlueSky of a hedge being laid. I am guessing that it is on his farm in the Lake District in England?
Rebanks’ photograph took me home, back to Britain, to a time and place that sits deeply in my heart. I’m seeing a clear winter’s day as in this picture. I’m seeing a hedge being laid, the first time that I have seen one, or at least noticed the practice of hedge laying. Like many things, once I knew what I was looking at, from time to time I would see hedges being laid elsewhere.
A natural boundary
Hedge laying is the practice of creating a natural fence. This is achieved by partially cutting through shrubs and trees at near ground level, and then bending those branches so as not to break them, but to allow them to be layered on top of each other. As the branches have not been broken, new growth will ensue the following Spring (hedge laying is carried out in winter while the sap is low and growth is dormant). The resultant hedge creates a living fence effective to prevent sheep and cows from straying to neighboring fields or onto a road. They negate the need for artificial fences while allowing the biodiversity of the countryside to flourish.
I can’t speak to the truth of my next statement, but I would guess that hedge laying is a dying skill in Britain (someone please tell me this is not true)? Stringing a fence of wire is easier than maintaining a living fence. Too often when I lived in Wales I would see tractor like machines driving beside hedges ripping their tops and sides off. The only saving grace was that this was not allowed to take place during bird nesting season - nature was respected to some degree, before the mechanized and labour saving devices moved in to do their deed. The debris from the stripped bushes would just be left on the road or in the field, clogging up natural drainage.
My own experience of hedge laying
I had a hedge laid on the property where I lived. The previous owner had allowed the hedge to turn into a series of trees. If it wasn’t for the wire fence installed by the farmer between my property and his field next door, I would have had sheep roaming around…which might not have been a bad thing given the length that I sometimes allowed the grass to grow to (I was experimenting with wildflower meadows…or so I told myself).
Mr. James was the local handyman. As far as I knew he had grown up in the area. He was truly a man of the land on which he lived, a face tanned from being outside everyday, and a smile and laugh that revealed a true contentment with his lot. I remember him talking about his ponies that he would show at the annual local county shows. He had green fingers and would speak to when he got his vegetables planted, and then a few months later of his harvest.
Mr James himself might have suggested that I get the hedge laid. I cannot remember now, but I do remember the day that he came to work on that hedge. The weather was not dissimilar to that in Rebanks’ photograph above. The stretch to be worked on was at least 100 yards, maybe more. Sadly if I took any photographs of the work that day, I no longer have them.
As Mr James was nearing the end of the hedge he came to a group of young Ash trees. We decided to keep one of them. The other trees felled, Mr James stepped back to admire the one that we chose to keep. He looked up at the tree, and with hands illustrating a straight, upward growth, smiled and effused at the health and arrow like straightness of this sapling, a broad smile across his face. He effused pure joy.
As Spring came the newly laid hedge burst into bloom, young leaves and shoots budding forth.
British hedges
Britain is well known for its hedge rows. According to the Britain Express website,
Estimates vary, but there may be upwards of 500,000 miles of hedgerows in England today.
Apparently usages of hedges as boundaries between fields might go back to the Roman times. This has led to various methods being devised to determine the age of a hedge.
Several historians have advanced mathematical formulae for calculating the age of a hedgerow based on the number of plant species found in a certain length of hedge. As an extremely rough rule of thumb, one species of hedge plant per 100 years seems to get close to the truth.
On hearing this formula I remember starting to count the different species in the hedges around where I lived. As I counted I spotted a fruiting hop plant in the middle the hedge. I cannot remember how old those hedges were, but a few hundred years going by the above formula.
Oh, the changes that they would have seen. The stories that they could have told.