If you go to the South West of England, the counties of Devon and Cornwall, you will notice that the lanes are quite sunken in many places and the hedges grow on high banks. The banks seem to be the bulk of the field boundary, and sometimes the banks are stone faced. The hedge on top tends to be small. This style of hedge is found also in other south western areas, including parts of Pembrokeshire, Wales' most South Western county, and scholars think that it might be a very ancient style that has survived to shape the landscape. In northern parts of the country, the stony hills of the Pennines and Cumbria [where the Lake District is situated] hedges tend to be few as dry stone walls are the norm. But across most of England hedges are common and they shape the patchwork of fields that give the English landscape its distinct character.
Scholars can confidently assert that some hedges are really ancient, possibly going back beyond the dawn of recorded history. One way of telling such hedges is that they grow on top of low banks, and it is thought that these hedges used to surround woodlands that were hedged against marauding deer. The woods are often gone, changed into fields, but the hedge remains as a relic of an ancient pedigree. Sometimes such ancient hedges were simply carved from the ancient wood and allowed to grow.When this happened people took the scrub at the edge of the wood and managed it into a hedge. One of the signs of hedges like this is that they contain wild, woodland flowers, such as anemones and bluebells. Some such derelict hedges appear in the landscape as lines of mature trees. What happened here is that the hedge was of a kind known as hedge with standard trees. Parkland owners or farmers cut down the hedge but left the trees, so you can trace the line of the hedge though it is gone.
One of the criteria by which the age of a hedge can be determined to a rough degree is the straightness or otherwise of it. Mediaeval hedges reflect the state of England at that period, a hotch potch of fields without clear pattern. The ancient hedges from this period are often curved, sometimes tracing an S pattern, sometimes a c along the winding English lanes, themselves ancient routes. In these ancient hedges there is a wide variety of species, often reflecting local woodland conditions, for people often went into the woods to dig up the plants for the hedge. Later hedges from the period of enclosures, the late eighteenth century, are often in ruthlessly straight lines reflecting modernist rationalism and contain either entirely hawthorn,or a mixture of hawthorn and blackthorn, a spiky plant well suited for hedging. Some earlier attempts at hedges formed of barberry [Berberis] foundered, for despite its savage spikes well capable of deterring intruders, it hosts a fungus inimical to wheat, so many barberry hedges were grubbed up to be replaced by hawthorn.
A more recent type of hedge has grown up besides walled fields, where the all has been lined by untrimmed vegetation. This is more common in Northern England, where stone walls are the norm.
If some of you wonder why I have not discussed Hooper's Rule, which attempts to assess the age of a hedge by counting the number of species in it, my refraining is because there is criticism of this rule, and even Hooper thought it at best a rule of thumb, so I believe that it misleads and should be abandoned.
Comments
That is about right for the height of many farm hedges.
The last paragraph under your second subheading, Laying Hedges, cautions that "The only problem is deer, which can leap over hedges, and so the height of the hedge needs to be raised if there is a deer problem."
Hedges on this, western-pond side tend toward 6 to 8 feet (1.83 to 2.44 meters) if they're boundary-marking or sentient animal-excluding. Would that be about the range on your, eastern-pond side?
It would seem that with a design so old and reliable that taking them out would cause pause, and those so inclined would allow the hedges to remain. Yet, greed in using every foot has obviously proven folly in certain areas.
Well done.
Yes, it is believed that some hedges were hacked out of the ancient wood, but I could not tell you which ones or any specific one. There are none round where I live. Unfortunately, local people don't know which ones. You would need an academic specialist on hedges to tell you, but I did point out that many hedges in Devon and Cornwall are possibly quite ancient. That's the area where the most ancient hedges will be found. The reason for this is that despite what many people say about English history, that the Saxons came in as invaders, many areas in the South West suffered no disturbance during that period and there has been continuity of population there for thousands of years. Generally areas on the English/Welsh borders might be the place to find really ancient hedges. In general across the lowlands of Britain farm boundaries have changed over the years and hedges felled and replanted,, which is why I think that the further west and South West of the country would be the place to find such ancient treasures.
The important thing about these very ancient hedges is that they are continuous in time with the wood, and they might have been cut out in Anglo-Saxon times, when woodland was being felled to make fields. Since then they have been trimmed and maintained so that only the wild flowers will reveal that they are ancient, though they will tend to have several species of tree in them.
The late Patrick Whitefield's book, How to Read a Landscape, says something about this. Patrick was my first Permaculture teacher, and he was a real expert on British land use.
So if I read your piece correctly, there are hedges, living hedges, that go back to the dawn of recorded history, thousands of years ago? WOW! I really want to see this.
The demarcation of plots or garden areas could be a science, I never knew. I did not think before that hedges could be so beneficial, all I knew was they were there to beautify and mark the borders.
Our ancestors did provide a natural solution to prevent soil eradication. Instead of using concrete or stones, it was better to grow different plant species that could benefit the garden. Hope gardeners take the trouble of growing hedges employing traditional techniques.