The Backbone of the British Countryside

Walk any footpath across lowland Britain and you are almost certainly walking beside a hedgerow. They divide our fields, mark our parish boundaries and, in many places, trace the line of an enclosure award two centuries old. But a hedgerow is not simply a fence that happens to be alive. It is a habitat, a windbreak, a larder, a corridor and a piece of living history all at once, and on a working farm it earns its keep many times over.

Estimates vary, but Britain holds somewhere in the region of half a million kilometres of hedgerow. That is a remarkable resource. It is also a diminished one: roughly half of what stood in 1945 was lost to field enlargement, neglect and Dutch elm disease in the decades that followed. The decline has largely halted, and in some counties hedgerow length is creeping back up, but plenty of what remains is in poor condition — gappy, over-trimmed and flailed into a thin line of knuckled stems with nothing below.

Corridors for Wildlife

What makes a hedge valuable to wildlife is its structure. The best ones are dense at the base, thorny through the middle and allowed to grow a little untidy on top. That three-tier profile gives cover for nesting, shelter for travelling and food in the form of flowers, berries and insects.

• Birds — yellowhammers, linnets, whitethroats and dunnocks nest in the thorny middle layer, while winter berries on hawthorn, holly and spindle feed fieldfares and redwings.
• Mammals — dormice, hedgehogs and shrews use hedgerows as sheltered highways, and bats commute along them between roosts and feeding grounds.
• Invertebrates — the brown hairstreak butterfly lays its eggs on young blackthorn, and the dead wood at the base of an old hedge supports beetles found almost nowhere else.

Connectivity matters as much as quality. A hedgerow running unbroken from a copse to a stream, or linking up with a ditch and a rough grass margin, will hold far more species than an isolated length of the same hedge in the middle of a bare field. This is why a gap of a few metres can be worth more attention than a whole hedge in good order.

Shelter, Stock and Soil

For livestock, a well-grown hedgerow is a serious piece of infrastructure. A hedge of about two metres will slow the wind for a distance of roughly ten times its height downwind, taking the edge off everything from a February gale to a baking August afternoon.

• Reduced wind chill means stock hold condition on less feed through the winter.
• Sheltered fields improve lamb survival in cold, wet spring weather.
• Wind-filtered air carries less soil, so erosion and spray drift are reduced.
• Beetles, ladybirds and parasitic wasps overwinter in the base, helping with pest control in the adjacent crop.

There is a sound practical argument, then, for treating the hedge as part of the farming system rather than an obstruction at the field edge.

The Management Year

The legal position is straightforward: hedgerows must not be cut between 1 March and 31 August, because that is when birds are nesting. The permitted window runs from 1 September to the end of February. But what is permitted is not always what is wise.

Cutting the same hedge every single year is the quickest way to ruin it. Annual flailing removes the flowers and berries before they can feed anything, and trimming to the same height year after year produces a bollarded hedge — thick at the top, hollow underneath and useless as cover. The better approach is rotational: cut a hedge hard every second or third year, or cut one side and the top in alternate years, and let each hedge flower and fruit in between.

Where you do trim, aim for a triangular profile — wide at the base, tapering upward. That shape lets light reach the bottom of the hedge and keeps it dense to the ground, which is exactly where most of the wildlife lives.

Hedge Laying and Rural Heritage

Laying is the traditional method of rejuvenating a hedge, and it remains the finest. The stems are partially cut near the base, bent over at an angle and woven along the line, then held in place with stakes and binders of hazel or sweet chestnut. The work is done between October and March, when the sap is down and the wood is supple.

Every region developed its own style — the Midland bullock hedge, the steep-sided Devon banks, the Dorset and Welsh methods, the Highland style of the north. Each reflects local climate, available timber and the stock it had to hold. The tools have barely changed either: a billhook, a small axe, a handsaw and a good pair of gloves.

A laid hedge is dense to the ground, stock-proof and will grow away strongly for fifteen to twenty-five years. It costs more in labour than an afternoon of flailing, but it repays that in saved trimming, better shelter and a hedge that looks like it belongs in the landscape. Hedge laying competitions at county shows are a reminder that this is a skill still very much alive, and a young hedger who learns it will never be short of work.

Practical Steps for Any Holding

• Survey first. Walk the boundaries and note which hedges are species-rich, which are gappy and which simply need a rest.
• Leave a buffer. A two-metre uncultivated strip beside the hedge protects roots and gives rough grass for insects and small mammals.
• Cut on rotation, never annually, and leave some lengths uncut each year for berries and nesting cover.
• Gap up with native species of local provenance — hawthorn, blackthorn, hazel, field maple, dog rose and holly.
• Protect new planting with guards and mulch mats, and water in a dry first summer.
• Keep records of what you do and when, and look into the hedgerow management options available under current agri-environment support.

None of this demands a great deal of money. Mostly it asks for patience, a willingness to leave a hedge slightly scruffier than a tidy eye might like, and a long view of twenty years rather than one. Do that, and the hedgerows on your patch will go on doing what they have always done — holding the soil, sheltering the stock, and stitching the British countryside together.