Close to the hedge

Hedgelaying is great for wildlife and keeps you active, master hedgelayer Malcolm Dowling tells Siân Ellis

“It gets me up in the morning, it gets me out. All my life I’ve been tied up with nature; it’s brilliant,” North Somerset-based Malcolm Dowling enthuses. At the age of ten, he learnt hedge-laying from his grandfather and now, nearly 78, he continues to practise the craft. In between times he has worked in farming and forestry, as a fireman and a postman, and when he retired from Royal Mail at 60 he decided to keep active – trading under the name ‘Granddad’ (he has nine grandchildren), he does hedge-laying, dry stone walling and landscape gardening for a range of customers, councils to farmers. He is also one of the Cotswolds Rural Skills hedge-laying instructors (see ‘Have a Go’).

Hedges have been part of our scenery since the Bronze Age, however the majority today derive from the Enclosures of the 18th and 19th centuries. In the Cotswolds, along with dry stone walls, they run across the landscape like character lines over a much-loved face: walls generally on higher, thinner soils and escarpment ridge tops, hedges on deeper soils.

Loss of hedgerows, largely caused by changed farming practices, labour costs and lack of skills, is a modern concern but Malcolm says: “A lot of the places I go on, the farmers are conservation-minded. They look after their hedges and you get lots of wildlife there.”

While hedges were originally planted and laid to form field and stock-proof boundaries, they are also hugely important as wildlife corridors and habitat, and as protection against soil erosion by wind and rain.