The hedgerow: modest icon of the English Landscape

'An awful lot of England is slowly eroding, in ways that I find really distressing, and an awful lot of it is the hedgerows... We're reaching the point where a lot of the English countryside looks just like Iowa - just kind of open space.'

Bill Bryson

You don't need to wander very far from the centre of Hitchin before you are strolling through a glorious patchwork of fields and lanes, all bordered by verdant hedgerow, writes Sparky.

Hedgerows are everywhere, which is a joy. However, their commonplace nature might just work against them, too. Simply put, we take them for granted and assume that they will be there forever. But we shouldn't and they won't, certainly if recent history is anything to go by. Bill might just be on to something.

To preserve the look and feel of the British- and our local- countryside, I believe that it is in our own best interest to reacquaint ourselves with these everyday wonders, which are a great example of man working together with nature to produce something special. And unusually for something so pleasing, their origins are quite utilitarian.

When our ancestors decided to knock that old hunting-and-gathering lark on the head and decided to grow crops and keep animals instead, they needed a way to secure that small patch of land that they called home and leaving narrow strips of uncleared scrub and woodland as instant barriers provided a simple solution to keep everything safe.

And lo, the hedgerow was born. Yes, as a concept they are that old.

The planting and use of hedgerows then continued pretty well unabated for centuries with occasional flurries of extra activity and this includes the estimated 200,000 miles of new hedges planted from the mid 1700s until the Edwardian era. This was partly driven by the process of 'Enclosure by Act', whereby previously large, shared fields- often common land- were divided up into smaller parcels and put into private ownership.

The long term social and economic effects of this formalised land grab were significant as many of the displaced rural populace fled to the ever-growing towns and cities, eventually providing the cheap and plentiful labour for the burgeoning industrial revolution.

The rest, as they say, is history- whether for good or ill.

But we did gain a lot of new hedgerows.

The dating hedgerows to place them into some form of historical context is possible and the age of adjacent trackways, old maps and land records are obviously a great help, but other clues are available.

Hedgerows resulting from enclosure tend to be straighter than their older, twisty counterparts, and those that contain stone walls or earth banks can occasionally be dated using archaeological methods.

In the 1970s Max Hooper, an esteemed biologist, historian and champion of hedgerows, devised a simple method of approximate dating by counting the number of different tree and shrub species that are to be found a 30 yard (27.4 metre) stretch. Subsequent multiplying of the total number of species by 100 will then give you the age of the hedge in years.

Last week I decided to road test this simple piece of citizen science and set-off with a spring in my step to get a'counting.

My specimen hedge borders a bridleway running from the Wymondley Road as it leaves Hitchin to Arch Road in Great Wymondley. I don't know the exact age of this track, but the 30 yards of hedge I examined contained at least nine species.

In no particular order these were: dog rose (Rosa canina); blackthorn (Prunus spinosa); bramble aka the blackberry bush (Rubus fruticosus agg); holly (Ilex aquifolium); dogwood (Cornus sanguinea); buddleia (Buddleia davidii); ash (Fraxinus excelsior); a splendid wild cherry (Prunus avium) and, of course, loads of that most common of our local hedgerow shrubs, hawthorn (Crategus monogyna), historically chosen for its dense and fast-growing habit.

Based on the Hooper Formula, this hedgerow- and presumably the track running alongside- must therefore be at least 900 years old, slightly younger than the beautiful Norman church in nearby Great Wymondley, which is a great target for this stroll.

This was an enjoyable exercise which allows you to see the familiar in a new and more appreciative light, as well as learning stuff, too. Maybe have a go yourself on a stretch of your own favourite local hedgerow?

And before we move on, it might be time for a bit of quick reflection on the bramble, possibly the most widely recognised of all our hedgerow shrubs. I guess that this plant's level of familiarity is mainly driven by the highly scoffable nature of its delicious late summer bounty: the blackberry.

I'm no wild food expert but even I can recognise a ripe blackberry when I see one and have been collecting them for jam making since my children were small, and still do now that they are adults. Opening a fresh jar from the stash on a cold dark February day immediately takes you back to warmer brighter times, for it is the essence of an English summer.

My friend Jane is a well-established local forager and she has promised to share some of her knowledge with me on a local walk later in the autumn. I can't wait so expect updates in due course.

As well as providing delicious jam, the benefits of the UK's half a million miles of hedgerow to wildlife are also significant, not only as a home and a larder, but as natural 'superhighways' too. It is estimated that over 500 plant species, 60 types of bird, countless invertebrates and nearly all of our native mammal species rely on them for their existence.

With their undoubted benefits to both man and beast you would like to think that we have been actively preserving the existing ones as well as planting anew, wouldn't you? But no.

Hedgelink (hedgelink.org.uk) say that we have lost over 50% of our hedgerows since WWII and of those that survive, some 60% are poorly managed. But there might be some sound historical reasons for at least some of this loss.

In the mid to late 1940s the Ministry of Food focussed on helping a ration-weary population feed itself. The subsequent move to more intensive farming and larger fields inevitably led to the mass grubbing-up of thousands of miles of hedgerow and the huge prairie-like fields of East Anglia bear witness to this: shades of Bryson's Iowa, perhaps? Local examples can be seen from the A505 beyond Baldock.

Some seven decades later I am pleased to say that the tide does now seem to be turning, with the government's nascent Environmental Land Management Scheme (ELMS) specifically encouraging and paying landowners to restore natural habitats, including both hedgerow and woodland. Fingers crossed, eh?

From the patchwork quilt of an idealised English landscape to hedgehogs and hedge sparrows, to the embowered sunken lane containing the hedge hiding place of our hero in 1939's 'Rogue Male', to blackberry jam, to the privet and the box and all those suburban cousins, to Led Zep's lyrical double entendre, to Lemon Jelly's artwork for their 'Lost Horizons' LP, and finally, to a 900-year-old specimen near Great Wymondley- let's hear it for all those modest hedgerows, for they are truly iconic.