Off this road that runs into Rutland a section of hedge finds my eye. I’ve long liked how it twists over the brow of the road, like a dry-stone wall over a Lakeland hillside.
Hedges are often described as Britain’s biggest nature reserves, and the most ignored. Step back: here in English lowland, hedgerows are the edges of the patchwork, the lines that divide the landscape. Try imagining it without them. They are as essential to its aesthetic as features to a face.
In the winter this hawthorn hedge loses its walls. You can see inside, see its chaos, its bric-a-brac of intergrown elements. Fragrant summer garlands withered to a translucent veil. Braids of hart’s-tongue fern running over a collapsed section like lashing rope. The odd old berry hanging like a blackened carapace. One or two new ones of bright red.
I stand so my head is almost inside the hedge and listen. I can hear the “meep” of a bird somewhere down-hedge, sense the twitch of unseen movement among the floors of the branches.
Hedges are nature’s little tenements – verticals of indoor life that cover a spectrum of standards. I walk off the road to a lane and here in a single mile, it seems, are all of them. The destitute, the unruly, the consciously crafted. One side a hedge still fat with dark berries and a mane of lustrous leaves. It faces a threadbare hawthorn, a scrabble of hard lines unceremoniously truncated at its top, a row of fingers grasping for the sky.
This hedge is old. Its limbs carry a fluorescence of lichen, its trunks a coat of ivy. Beneath, there is a series of small arches, wriggle-runs for an array of animal traffic and, from the flattened ground beneath, clearly well used. I look for hair caught on the thorns but find none.
Such density, and such life. Hedges are one of the landscape’s human touches that have been embraced by nature – though not, in many cases, by humans. A signature of the enclosures, a kind of self-maintaining barbed wire, a cheap and natural wall. Once they were razed, lost by the thousands of kilometres a year. Now they are one of the few human-created habitats we really can’t afford to lose.
