Welsh Journals

ENVIRONMENT AND WILDLIFE HEDGECRAFT Marjorie Sykes One of the lesser but very real delights of holidays in the Radnor district is the quality of the hedges. All too often in the Welsh Borders hedges are mere tattered remnants, brutally mangled every year by cutter-bar or shape-saw or flail and then, when they finally succumb to this annual flagellation, patched up with a few strands of barbed wire. (Fig 1). But in mid-Wales hedges are still lovingly tended, a practice not only aesthetically pleasing and important for wildlife but in the long run probably more economical. Pollard, Hooper and Moore in their book Hedges published figures showing the comparative costs over 80 years of installing and maintaining a hawthorn hedge and a cattle-proof fence, as a result of which they concluded that "there is no doubt that an established hedge is a cheap form of boundary." Even over a 40-year period a hedge costs slightly less, while over 80 years the cost of a hedge which has an indefinite life if well managed is only half that of a perishable fence. Hedges have a long history behind them. Prehistoric man seems to have evolved them primarily for defensive purposes, cutting branches to make prickly stockades round his cattle or crowning the earthen banks of his hill forts with bristling rows of stakes. Probably some of his cuttings rooted, as elder and willow for instance will very readily do; failing this, they at any rate protected a strip of land from grazing and trampling, so allowing seeds to colonise it and develop in course of time into a living hedge. That this is not mere armchair theorising is shown by Caesar's encounter with the Nervii, a Celtic tribe in Northern France, who defended themselves from raids behind impenetrable hedges: "they contrived that these wall-like hedges should serve them as fortifications which not only could not be penetrated, but not even seen through" (Gallic War). From this it would be a short step to their peaceful use as boundaries and cattle fences. Certainly the Saxons used them for both defensive and peaceful purposes. Our very word "hedge" together with its related forms "hay" and "haw" comes from the Old English hege (Middle English hegge), and is frequently found in place-names such as Hay, Hayes, Haw, Roundhay, Thronhaugh and so on. An early mention of a hedge, still for defensive purposes, comes tram the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle. The entry for 547 1 This is the winning entry in the Nature in Wales competition for an article written in a "popular style". The first prize of £ 20 was kindly awarded by the Council of Management of the WWNT. The Editor's report on the competition is on page 55.