I wrote this short review of Rob Wolton’s excellent book on hedges for the Devon Rural Skills Trust’s (DRST) summer newsletter. As it’s now autumn (or at least feels like autumn) I thought it would be worth re-publishing here. Enjoy.
Eddie Pollard, Max Hooper and Norman Moore’s influential book Hedges (Collins New Naturalist Library, number 58) is now a half-century old and an up-to-date treatment has been long overdue. … Read more
Both of these pieces were written as social media posts for Devon Rural Skills Trust. They are of their moment, and I hope they haven’t dated too quickly; what additions I have made are in square brackets (and my apologies for the repetition). The first site was on a hilltop near Ivybridge, south Devon, with glorious views and the traffic-hum of the A-38 ever present. … Read more
16 October 2021: Blackthorn
To begin I took home some blackthorn, cut out of a gorgeously dense Devon-style hedge beside a deeply-sunken lane on the edge of Dartmoor. Blackthorn is one of the many magical trees in British folklore, a gateway into an enchanted world. I split the recovered branch wood, sawed it to length, removed the bark and the waste wood with a hand axe, and began to carve. … Read more
It was worth stepping back from the worksite and looking from a distance: the farm’s hedges were a dazzle of yellows, browns and greens as the leaves really begin to show autumn is with us.
Easy to forget this is a worked landscape. Easy to forget the hedges and the banks they grow on are the result of a centuries-long cycle of rejuvenation and repair. … Read more
Thought I would pull together the social media posts on the first two courses Devon Rural Skills Trust has run since the long, frustrating Covid shutdown. They were written, of course, to aid the charity’s publicity but I hope they tell a story too, however briefly.
25 September
It means so much to be back running courses again after 18 months of uncertainty. … Read more
“Rake making still survives in certain country districts, for its basic material is cheap and plentiful, and the yearly demand from farmers is unfailing, though much diminished owing to the use of machinery.”
The quotation, from H.L.Edlin’s 1949 Woodland Crafts of Britain, did not age well. By the mid-1960s demand for wooden hay rakes had fallen to such an extent there were few makers left, their skills superseded by machinery and mass production, as Edlin had hinted. … Read more
At some point in that vast, soggy bowl where the river Avon rises, my two ghostly companions found themselves walking circles in the mist. They were not the first or the last to blame their misfortune on the supernatural, or some other beyond-us power: “Indeed so frequently has it happened that the country folk of Devonshire call it being pixie-led.”
I wasn’t carrying an adder skin, the customary Dartmoor charm used to break a pixie’s spell, but I did have better weather as I tried to retrace their footsteps. … Read more
Why does the humble woodlouse have so many names? A collection of Devon dialect words recorded by the Bigbury Women’s Institute in the late-1960s lists six terms, more than for any other animal, big or small. And it turns out I am not alone in asking the question. Warren Maguire, a linguistics professor at the University of Edinburgh, has done too and has so far collected more than 350 names for the ubiquitous little isopod. … Read more
Jim Jones jokes that his Ontario hedge is probably the only one in the world to have been laid using black walnut. The tree is indigenous to North America; laid hedges are anything but native.
Although early European settlers brought their skills with them few of their hedges survive. There was a short-lived fashion for Midland-style hedges, as gentleman farmers transported a little bit of the enclosure era across the Atlantic, but theirs too are largely gone. … Read more
Imagine it is the morning of a DRST (Devon Rural Skills Trust) hedge-laying course (and yes, we all hope to be running them again sooner rather than later): you are a vorenune-varmer (early starter), you look out of the window as a scat (a short, spiteful shower) of rain passes and an ickymal (blue tit) starts singing from a nearby tree. … Read more