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
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
“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 By the mid-1960s demand for wooden hay rakes had fallen to such an extent there were few makers left, their skills superseded by machinery and mass production, as Edlin had hinted.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