Words from the Hedge
A National Hedgerow Week special guest post...
Richard Negus is a hedgelayer with more than 25 years experience. He lays hedges on farms, shoots and estates throughout East Anglia. While the region has no unique hedgelaying style of its own, Richard adapted a number of traditional styles to suit its unique landscape and wildlife. Richard’s new book Words from the Hedge is now available for pre-order. We’re delighted to share an excerpt, to mark National Hedgerow Week, from May 6 - 12.
My chainsaw requires an elaborate series of pumping, priming and lever twisting. Only then, followed by repeated pulls on its cord, can I coax the engine into spluttering life. It hates me stopping for a tea break. I smile at my anthropomorphising a chainsaw, but it does have moods and foibles, seemingly of its own. Cold weather makes it race, warm weather causes reluctance. A fifteen-minute rest leaves it like a dozing soldier, reluctant to perform its duties.
I turn back to the hedge, glancing at the stems I cut and laid before I stopped to sip a cup of sweet black tea, scalding hot from my battered flask. They lay one over the next like a thorny row of toppled dominoes. Long scars stare out where I have chopped through the stems, or pleachers as they are called in our strange language of the hedge. So pale when first cut, they have now started to change colour. The maple turns a satsuma orange, the spindle ivory like, hazel and hawthorn a cookie brown. I make some upward cuts with my saw, taking away the side growth from a hawthorn pleacher.
It is January and no leaves adorn this gnarled and curlicued limb; a handful of berries, unclaimed by blackbird or thrush, still gamely cling on. Wizened like currants, they tinkle at my touch, coloured like a supermarket Beaujolais. Cleared of encumbrances I bend to cut my now clean, straight pleacher. The little saw roars once more and I make a diagonal cut downwards from right to left. I watch with an attentive eye through the mesh of my visor, looking for the base of the thorn to slightly give. This indicates I have made my cut sufficiently deep and reduced the rigidity of the growing plant. The top of my wrist flips the saw’s safety bar forward and my thumb depresses the stop button.
The thunderclap shift from anarchic roar to silence is dizzying, yet there is never real silence here. Rooks caw raucously and the chittering and squabbling of the long-tailed tits is both endless and amusing. One of the cock pheasants crows a challenge over at the wood some four score yards away. He quits his row and I hear him ruffle his mantle when he hears no rival’s reply.
Placing my saw down to my right, with gloved hands I bend the thorny pleacher gently over. Using my bill hook to make a final cut, I lay the clean limb to nestle and intertwine with its neighbour. The hinge does its job. Thick enough to support the pleacher in its new position of 40 degrees or so, but sufficiently flexible to allow me to alter nature. I flick the chainsaw back into life. Warmed up now, it is speedily responsive.
I trim off the heel of the stool and take a sideways step to my right to repeat the process with the next branch, then the next, then the next. I will stake and bind my hedge before I go home when the sun sets; this will guard my work from the pestiferous wind that loves to pluck at a hedge and undo hours of work. When I drive away, I survey my work in the gleam of my truck’s headlights. It is a sight I never grow tired of; it also pays my bills.
The stylised image of a hedgelayer is that of a leather-jerkined rustic, pipe smoke curling about his tattered cap a pie, cutting away in a towering line of thorn and branch with a viciously sharp and curiously shaped bill hook. The bill hook is an ancient tool, first found trimming Mesopotamian vines or Israelite briars. Bronze examples, thought to be over 1,000 years old, have been found in Egypt. At various points in history the humble bill lost its role as a tool for making good. It was instead called upon to become a thing of hate and destruction. This ergonomic tool of regeneration was downgraded to cut through muscle, bone and sinew, serving as the makeshift weapon for serfs and bondsmen, dragooned into leaving their land-based toil to become soldiers in some war or other for some lord, king or other.
I own three billhooks. The youngest, a Yorkshire style hook, was made in 1941 and is stamped with a military crow’s foot. My oldest, and favourite - a Midland style bill - was crafted by a long-forgotten Leicestershire smith in the 1920s. As the decades have rolled by, its handle has been replaced numerous times but the cutting blade is as sharp as a razor and takes an edge as only old hand-forged steel can. Purists sneer at my using a chainsaw to lay hedges, claiming that an axe should be used if a pleacher is too thick to be cut with a billhook. Many of these purists are amateurs, extremely talented amateurs it must be said, competing in hedgelaying competitions throughout the land. But I have a job to do and the niceties and purities of craft are as relevant to me as a traction engine is to the tractor driver discing a field in his behemoth John Deere. I have a mile of hedge to lay and I don’t have time to dwell upon tradition for the sake of tradition.
Hedges, unlike woodland, are and always will be a construct of man. Romano Britons cut and laid small trees to form livestock retaining enclosures. Gaps were filled by transplanting thorny shrubs; these saplings were protected with cut brash. The traces of these early hedges can still be seen today. After harvest, when the summer sun bakes the stubbles dusty yellow, the land reveals her ancient secrets to the questing camera of the drone. Dark lines, the memories of hedgerows long gone, spread out like the veins on the back of my father’s hand. As crop production increased, so hedges proliferated; they kept browsing wildlife out and gifted tender plants protection from the elements. Hedges acted as near permanent boundaries, their permanency led to the fields being given names. What would Sheffield, Huddersfield or Enfield be without the hedge? Hedges became walls, delineating the ownership of land.
When hedges grew too large and shaded out growing crops they were cut. If gaps appeared, enabling cattle or sheep to escape, they were filled by laid lengths. When the hedge got in the way they were coppiced and hacked. But these hedgerow battlements were too massive by now to be removed by mere hand tools. Trees were left behind and grew from sapling into towering elm or curlicued oak. The blackthorn suckers merely waited for a back to be turned to spring up and become a bank of scrub. These ancients had no thought that their hedge planting and management was providing habitat for wildlife. The idea that our forebears were somehow more at one with nature is a nonsense. The hedge is merely another example of man harnessing and mastering nature for his own ends.
Plants such as hawthorn, blackthorn, field maple, hazel, dogwood and rose all happily grow in fruitbowl jumbled profusion, jostling with one another for dominance. They are also precocious, sufficiently forgiving to allow man to cut and trim them to his whim, growing and regrowing with a speed, density and thickness that suits our needs. It was mere happenstance that man’s creation of the hedge suited wildlife, not due to any Anglo Saxon proto-conservationists.
A mixed hedge plays nursery to tree and house sparrows, yellowhammers, linnets, robins, blackbirds, thrushes, wrens and tits both blue and great. Finches – be they green, chaf, gold or bull – also rear their young in the crosswork of limbs. The grey partridge and pheasant escape from raptors in its thorny understory and weave their ground nest in the hedgerow’s lee. Shrews, mice and voles scurry and feed here. The hedgehog’s very name screams its preferred habitat. Rabbits and rats tunnel amongst the roots, the stoats and weasels follow them to dance then feast on the squealing subterranean inhabitants. Deer shelter from the elements here and badgers build their cavernous setts, foxes take up residence when brock decides to evacuate. Invertebrates – beetles, aphids, bees, flies, wasps and mites – call the hedge home. All-comers may feast upon the fruits borne by the hedge in autumn. This man-made haven, created to keep cows and sheep in and wind and rain out is so much more than a barrier. If the woods are the lungs of the land, the hedgerows are the arteries.
I love hedges.
National Hedgerow Week 2024 takes place from May 6 – May 12. For more information, to access resources and to book your free Hedge Talk spot, please visit www.nationalhedgerowweek.org.uk
To pre-order your copy of Words from the Hedge by Richard Negus, please visit www.unbound.com/books/words-from-the-hedge
This is brilliant! I had the pleasure of making a short documentary with Richard about hedges a couple of years ago. I'll definitely pick up a copy of his book. https://youtu.be/b9GQZUD1yHI?si=CHRTuaduc9GoYFNb