Walking around the local lanes a couple of weeks ago, I noticed that the hedges had been cut recently. Straight tops and sides, uniform height, all very neat. A bit like an ornamental hedge in the garden of a stately home!
The Badminton House hedges would have been cut using garden shears or (these days) a hand-held powered hedge-cutter. The hedges beside the road are dealt with by a tractor-attachment that leaves the ends of the branches looking mangled (as you can see in the 2nd picture below).
As it sometimes does, my mind turned to thinking how the country lane would have looked different in Regency times. No tarmac is one obvious difference, but the hedges would have looked quite different, too. There were no tractor attachments then, and farmers had better things to do than to take a pair of shears to all their hedgerows. Hedges were only trimmed on a 10-15 year cycle, so could be very tall indeed at times.
Trimming isn’t really the word for it, though. Unlike now, when many hedges are backed up by wire fences, hedges in Regency times had to be stock-proof. This photo shows what can happen to a hedge when only the tops and sides are trimmed each year. Not much of a barrier for sheep!
To keep the hedge thick, the hedge is ‘laid’. This involves cutting the main stems of the hedge nearly all the way through, and laying them down along the line of the hedge. The stems produce a low level woody barrier and, because they haven’t been completely severed, they will continue put out shoots that will grow upwards.
The photo shows a newly laid hedge, with stakes to help keep the barrier upright. The stakes here are sawn to a square cross-section, but in the Regency they would probably just have used stout sticks. Not all hedges are laid in quite the same way; the Wikipedia article on this lists 12 different styles within the British Isles.
Many hedges today are just trimmed as shown in the tractor photograph, but there are still some farmers and conservation organisations that lay hedges. A properly-laid hedge is not only stock-proof, but provides better habitats for wildlife, weather protection for crops in the adjacent fields, and also looks much nicer!
Shameless plug: Writing Regency England by Gail Eastwood and myself, describes the different landscapes of the English countryside, including ways in which it has changed since the Regency. It’s paperback only, and so probably only of interest if you are an author or really interested in the details it describes!
Hedge cutting pic by Michael Trolove under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.0 Generic license
