How a hedge is laid
The anatomyLeave a hawthorn hedge alone and it grows into a line of small trees, bare at the bottom, with gaps a sheep can walk through. Laying puts the thickness back where the stock is. Each stem is cut most of the way through near the ground, leaving a hinge of bark and wood, then bent over so it lies along the line of the hedge.[30] The bent stems stay alive, and the stumps they came from send up a thicket of new shoots. Those shoots become the next hedge.[1]
The words you'll meet
- Pleacher
- A stem cut part-way through and laid over. Locally a ligger (Lancashire, Cumbria), steeper (Devon) or splasher (North Somerset).[7][3][1]
- Stool
- The stump a pleacher was cut from, where the new shoots come from.[7]
- Stake
- A dead pole driven into the hedge to hold the pleachers. In North Somerset, a staver or stabber.[7][1]
- Binder
- A long, flexible rod, usually hazel, woven along the stake tops. Dorset's equivalent is the bond.[7][1]
- Crook
- A small hooked peg, cut from the hedge, that pins pleachers down on a bank. Some glossaries also use the word for the working side of a ditched hedge.[4][7]
- Crop
- A living stem left standing and topped off to serve as a stake. Montgomeryshire calls them standers.[4][1]
- Brush
- The twiggy ends of the laid stems. A single-brush hedge has them on one side, a double-brush hedge on both.[4]
- Whites
- The pale cut faces on the stems. Some styles hide them; Cheshire wants them all shining the same way.[3]
Two thousand years of bent stems
A short historyThe oldest written account of a laid hedge comes from a Roman general who couldn't get through one. In Book 2 of his Gallic War, Julius Caesar describes the Nervii, in what's now Belgium, cutting into young trees, bending them over and filling the gaps with brambles and thorns, until the hedges stood like a wall his men couldn't even see through.[10]
Britain's field boundaries are older still, with some hedge banks dating back to the Bronze Age.[8] The big wave of planting came with enclosure. The first enclosure bills went through Parliament in 1603–4, and planting peaked between 1750 and 1820, mostly single-species hawthorn set out in straight lines. By the end there had been 52,000 enclosure bills, covering a sixth of England and adding 200,000 miles of new hedge.[8] All that young thorn needed managing, and each district settled on the method that suited its landscape, its farming, the materials to hand and the growth in its hedges.[1]
Then the hedges started disappearing. The 1947 Agriculture Act paid farmers to remove them. A Forestry Commission count of 1 million km in 1950 had fallen to 477,000 km by 2007, a loss of about 52%.[8] Mechanical trimming made it easy to cut every hedge every year, so fewer were laid at all. The Hedgerows Regulations 1997 finally made it an offence to remove most hedges without permission.[8]
The National Hedgelaying Society was founded on 11 November 1978 to keep the craft alive, and the King has been its patron since his time as Prince of Wales.[11] Its National Championship lays eight styles side by side,[9] and its accreditation scheme recognises eleven: Midland, Welsh, Derbyshire, South of England, Lancashire and Westmorland, Yorkshire, Cheshire, North Somerset, Devon, Dorset and Northumberland.[35] The Society keeps formal technical guides so that rarer styles can be laid again in future, and admits there may be "as many hedgelaying styles as there are hedgelayers".[2]
The regional styles
England · Wales · Scotland · Northern IrelandEach style below has a rendered view and a drawn cross-section, both built from its written description. The renders show each hedge as it looks the day it's laid, in winter, bare and twiggy, before the spring growth comes through. Read them for the differences (where the stakes go, whether there's binding, which side the brush faces, whether there's a bank) and not for exact measurements. Where we couldn't confirm something, it says so.
England
England has the most recorded styles, and they blur at the edges. Midland meets the Welsh styles in Cheshire, Shropshire, Herefordshire and Worcestershire, and meets South of England in Oxfordshire, Buckinghamshire and Berkshire.[6] You won't find a Cornish style here: a Cornish "hedge" is a stone-faced bank with little or no greenery, and building one has more in common with dry-stone walling.[1]
Wales
Welsh hedges are sheep fences first, usually dense but not necessarily tall, and nearly always padded with deadwood until the regrowth comes through.[4] The TCV handbook admits that each area claims its own tradition and that it's often hard to tell a local style from one craftsman's habits. It sorts the dozen or more styles into four types, below.[4] The Welsh Border style is the one laid at the National Championship.[1]
Scotland and Northern Ireland
Scotland has no regional styles of its own. The Scottish Government's farm guidance says so plainly and treats the Midland style as the standard for mixed farms.[15] We found no recorded Northern Irish style either. Hedge laying on the island of Ireland is covered under Ireland, in the section on other countries.
Side by side
Scroll sideways on a phone| Style | Where | Bank | Stakes | Binding | Brush | Height |
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Laid hedges beyond the UK
Ireland · Low Countries · France · GermanyLaying never belonged to Britain alone. The Low Countries have the strongest living tradition outside the UK, and the evidence gets thinner the further you go. These entries rest on fewer sources, several of them read only in summary, and we haven't drawn diagrams for them because we couldn't confirm the measurements.