‘I don’t know if hedgelaying is a dying art. But there’s a lot of old hedgelayers that are dying,’ says David Whitaker to chuckles from some of his fellow craftsmen. The occasion is the annual hedgelaying championship, organised by the National Hedgelaying Society, of which Whitaker is secretary. In a good year, the event draws around 100 competitors and a few curious spectators to a marquee in a muddy field in Hampshire.
Britain’s oldest hedge dates back to the Bronze Age. Thousands of miles of hedgerow were laid in the late 1700s after the Enclosures Act carved up the countryside. There’s a formula for working out how old a hedge is – the number of plant species in a 90ft stretch of an old hedge roughly adds up to its age in centuries – so if you find, say, a hawthorn, some beech and perhaps some common holly, then the odds are you’ve found an Enclosures hedge. However, in the years after the second world war, many were torn up as the government encouraged larger farms and, as a result, more than 100,000 miles of hedgerows have disappeared since the 1950s.
‘Are we little more than historical re-enactors, demonstrating past techniques but irrelevant today?’
A healthy hedge is home to dozens of species, from ground-nesting birds to hedgehogs, dormice, bats and lizards. It also serves as a bulwark against floods and erosion. The government wants farmers to plant 30,000 miles of hedges by 2037, having belatedly recognised their many benefits. Through generous grants from Defra, taxpayers will be picking up a large part of the tab.
The bill is likely to be higher still thanks to a lack of professional hedgelayers. The craft has slowly fallen out of fashion, save for a dwindling group of devoted practitioners. The King is one of just a few hundred hobby hedgelayers and, as Prince of Wales, hosted regular competitions at Highgrove.
Clive Matthew, whose father taught him to lay hedges on the family farm, prides himself on missing only a single national competition since 1974. Back then, already concerned about the future of his craft, he founded the National Hedgelaying Society with two like-minded friends. ‘We were having some ciders after a competition and the ciders rather got the better of us,’ he remembers. ‘But I was serious. I could see the way hedgelaying was going.’ That year, the late Lord Vestey granted them access to his farm for their first countrywide contest. They placed an advert in the paper, attracting cutters from all over the country.
Still, the number of hedgelayers kept dwindling. ‘Are we little more than historical re-enactors, demonstrating past techniques but irrelevant today?’ one layer recently lamented in the society’s newsletter. A few of the competitors at the annual meet are pushing 80. ‘It’s like any traditional craft,’ Whitaker says. ‘The people who do it are getting older and we are trying desperately to encourage the younger generation to get more involved.’ The society funds training and accreditation for casual practitioners and organises taster sessions across the country. It also launched a call for paid work placements last year. Only two applicants got in touch.
One was Alice Roe. She has only been laying hedges for a few weeks but already wields her billhook with confidence. Under the tutelage of Mick Thwaites, a burly landscape gardener with bushy grey sideburns, she’s learning how to pleach a hedge, lay it down and bind it, sprucing up part of the Courteenhall estate in Northamptonshire.
Roe used to work on an orchard in Somerset and spotted an advert for the trainee scheme while scrolling through Instagram. ‘You actually have to use your brain, and every single tiny stretch is completely different,’ she says. After a day out in the fields, she likes to show off pictures of her freshly laid hedges on social media.
She and the rest of Thwaites’s team managed to lay two miles of hedgerow by the end of March, when birds started breeding in the hedges. Roe has been learning how to carefully cut into the stems of mature shrubs close to the ground, then bend each trimmed trunk – a ‘pleacher’ in hedgelaying parlance – down at an angle without snapping it off. Wooden stakes are driven into the earth at regular intervals to support the structure, and the brushy tops of the pleachers are then threaded in between. Woven willow ‘binders’ artfully tie up the top. Called Midland style, this type of hedge is one of more than a dozen regional varieties and is designed to withstand the push of cattle and horses.
Courteenhall has been in the hands of the Wake family for more than 350 years. The current inhabitant, Johnny, can see on old maps the hedgerows that were ripped out over the past centuries. ‘Like any farmland across England, the fields used to be a heck of a lot smaller,’ he says. A good chunk of the estate’s hedges have been laid recently; some will be used to fence in his 30 Hereford cattle. Since he began managing his hedgerows, Wake has spotted more endangered species, including yellowhammers, hedgehogs and great crested newts.
Thwaites isn’t impressed by some of the hedges on the 750-hectare estate, which had recently been flailed to six feet – much too low, in his professional opinion. ‘It’s a bit scrappy, this bit,’ he says, pointing out a stretch of hawthorn and blackthorn bushes hugging a one-lane road. ‘I would have left it another two, three years before laying it again. But they want it all done.’ With more and more landowners requesting his services, he jumped at the chance to hire Roe as a trainee. ‘There’s just so much work about at the moment. But it’s difficult to find people full stop, especially younger folks.’
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