My father taught me how to lay a hedge when I was a schoolboy. I've never forgot and laid my garden hedge in February. One of the most satisfying jobs in the countryside.
@JohnGlen502 You can only lay hedges in the winter until early spring so from November until late March when the sap rises. It can be seen in most areas of rural Britain and probably best to visit a competition such as the Young Farmers.
@@iantucker1433 I was just curious. I live in eastern South Dakota this is not something we've ever done here to my knowledge. But maybe in the eastern states that were settled much earlier.
@JohnGlen502 I was in New England last September and not something i noticed there. I'll ask my daughter if she noticed any hedging in West Virginia when she was there a few years ago. She stayed on a friend's farm where they rear horse for fox hunting so obviously British influence there. I live in Dorset in south-west England and hedge laying styles can change in different counties.
I know nothing about hedge upkeep, but back in the 1980s I spent two years motorcycle touring throughout the UK, and a fair bit of Europe as well, always keeping to the small roads. So I've spent thousands and thousands of hours riding alongside English hedgerows. I treasure the memories.
I've seen this a few times now. That hedger's easy looking style belies his skill and the razor sharp edge on his billhook! The film is both nostalgic and informative to the uninitiated. Thankfully hegelaying continues today, is being recognised as a real craft and there's a steady growth in interest.
…this hedger man is an utter success; he’s got outside work that keeps him fit, a job that’s productive, ecological, sustainable and a handsom practical woman as company
Handsome woman 😂, I'm sorry is that proper English you're referring to? I'm JK but seems to me, when a female without makeup and or is working physically labor, and in good shape is called handsome by the British, but if she be dressed up, then bequest a lady. So terminology is different. I'm just a dumb yank, sorry, also many here in the US say handsome woman when speaking about a homely female that's a good worker, so all the categories have me curious as I'm sure you understand
@@shable1436 "handsome" woman.. apart from being simply a phrase out of fashion i think "handsom" is adequate to show respect to a woman who is at good work and simultaneously express arousal at the sight of her being so. “handsom " i believe is sufficiently weighted, not overtly sexual, thus allowing her to ignore or enjoy my procreative hint whilst preserving our modesties
I can remember being fascinated watching my dad do this around our property in the late 70's, and I can recall seeing old remnants of the stakes and binders buried deep in the hedge when I had to cut the hedge myself in 2000! That hedgerow still exists today.
Pauline, where is your farm? You still live around there. After watching this I began to wonder if I could go to my family’s farm and do a short stretch.
within the last year a had a youtube jag where I was watching videos about flax and turning it into linen, for like a week, and splitting rocks - big rocks. gonna do a search for "whitewash" soon...
That could almost be my English mother. She was a girl of 16 and volunteered for the Women's Land Army - so she left home and was billeted in that part of England. She told me later of all the hard work that she had to do and showed me photos of her in the uniform that you see in this video. I always remember her talking about all the hay she had to stack in the barns - and she always made sure her trousers were tucked in her boots so that the rats and mice would not run up her legs. She also said how cold it was in the winter. Sometime later in the war there was an Italian Prisoner of War Camp that was near the farm where she would work and Italians would help out on the farm. Her name was Margaret and she tells me they used to sing the song 'La Bella Margarita, so beautiful to see.......'
Great story and history for your family, be sure to pass it down. So much is lost every day from Japan, to England to the old ways in the USA. I’m only 50 and so much of what we did on the farm in PA is lost already, thank god for the Amish and Mennonites around here.
Nice story! ...Bella Margarita!!! Speaking of Italian POWs, here's a great story about them I watched recently. ruclips.net/video/39BhaqucJzg/видео.html
Never took the pipe out of his mouth haha. This is a very interesting program and series. The Land Girl who was helping the Hedge Layer, was a program that put women on farms that were short handed due to men serving in WW2. For anyone that doesn’t know. The British were having a hard time producing enough food due to German blockades and war expense. So those farm programs really helped.
Thank you for that fact! I absolutely love these tidbits learned in the comment section. And the jobs ladies took during WW2 efforts are fascinating to learn about. So much history is forgotten, or not valued as it should be.
And probably because materials like barbed wire, metal posts and hardware were in short supply, needed for the war effort, the authorities were trying to encourage traditional fencing techniques.
I wish this was practiced in the USA. the ability to help keep bees and birds so the land is enriched is ingenious! as well as being a privacy and livestock block. and thats not even mentioning how edible these typically are w/elderberry, blackberry and other berry plants. or holly in the christmas time.
Just the opposite was practiced here in the U.S. in the 1960's onward. Trees and fences were taken out, and small ponds filled so that there was no impediment to the ever larger tractors used here. The ponds were natural and used by migrating waterfowl, the trees were important bird and small game habitat.
Some of them are hundreds of years old. There is a rule of thumb method for dating based on the number of species tree species. They are usually laid with hawthorn but near me holly is often used
I’ve been an admirer of people who can lay hedges all my life . My first tool at fifteen was an Echo pruning chainsaw.I small saw with a ten inch bar .Every Saturday during my early teens I cleared the sides of our hedgerows .They had been neglected for decades and the brambles grew out ten feet from the banks of the hedges. The enclosures act of the 1750, was the first big drive to regulate the ownership of land properly in Britain and Ireland . Some of those hedges and ditches you pass are over two hundred years old .To me they are time capsules. Every Christmas Day I clear a stretch of the road near my parents with two bad turns so that it’s safe for others for the rest of the year .There are some weak areas in it and after watching this video I’m going to apply this man’s system to them . Apart from a war going on that must have been a lovely time . I met lots of that generation when I was young and the men were gentlemen and the women ladies .God bless them
I am 76 now, I used to do this job and many more when I was young working with my father. Dry stone walling was another one. This vid brings back memories, hands full of thorns! Good job in cold weather.
Very enjoyable video, and so clear in its instruction. Straightforward, no fuss, as was the way in the 1940s. The pipe was nice. And Molly definitely a delight. I was taught this as a boy in Derbyshire, around 1960, from an old farmer. It's one of the most pleasing of occupations, and really nothing more is needed than these tools shown, a slasher and a billhook, though we had a bow saw for removing anything very big. I'm glad that chain saws, with their noise, were not deemed necessary then. There is some excuse, however, for modern hedge-layers having them, because these days they often have to deal with hedges that have been left for far too long, and have developed into small trees. I remember that we often didn't bother with binding along the top. As the stakes - all of which were cut from the unwanted bits of the hedge - were initially threaded down, the layings were pushed to one side and another as the point passed, so that they were kept sprung reasonably tightly against the stake, and this generally kept them down and in place. For any awkward bits we'd cut a stake leaving a few inches of short side-branch on it here and there, which held the boughs down more directly. If the stake was strong enough we could drive it in upside-down, as it were, leaving an actual hook-shape on its [new] top end. The old boy's billhook in this video obviously cuts extrememly well. A tip here is to grind off the shoulder on a new tool, where the manufacturer's original grinding or shaping meets the flat of the blade. I don't know if that's understandable. What is achieved is that the blade's cross-section, essentially a wedge-shape, becomes then a longer and thinner wedge. It's this wedging action, in its jamming of the blade and absorption of its momentum, that often is the main limit to one's ability to make large cuts easily with a new hook, especially with some of the recent cheap ones made in China. [I learned this later when employed as a tree climber/feller - another lovely job.] If you do this use a water-cooled grinding wheel if possible, otherwise go carefully and keep cooling the blade. Of course, in the field, the cutting edge has to always be kept well honed as well. One other comment for anyone wanting to have a go - and it's worth trying on any kind of hedge plant, works perfectly well with an old privet hedge, for instance, or holly, or beech - it doesn't have to be hawthorn, as in most of the video. If the hedge is on a hillside, start at the higher end, so that there's no chance of any of the laid boughs ending up horizontal or even downwards, which could of course interfere with the natural upwards flow of their new sap in the spring. Thank you for uploading the film. Really worthwhile to keep knowledge alive of these old things, all part of us still.
Rob Wilde I’m sure it was a company called Ewell that used to make the best hedge laying tools and different parts of the country have their own particular way or style of laying a hedge. Some of the hedges local to me (I’m in S. Lincolnshire) were laid about 7-8 years ago and they’re about 4 times the height now. 👍
Interesting idea! But briars grow mainly by pulling themselves up other plants, that's the purpose of their backward-pointing hooks. They do grow into large clusters by themselves, it's true, if they can find nothing stouter to climb, but then they're only climbing up the adjacent briar, and the total mass has no bulk or strength. It might deter a human - because of the spikes - but cattle would just push through.@@Philip-hv2kc
My father won a national competition for hedge laying for under 16 year olds at around the time this film was made. Very interesting as it was one of the skills that I never had the opportunity of learning from him.
Remember that the Brits were being asked to get more and more productivity from the land during the war. Put into that context, this film is extremely important to the war effort.
@@marktrain9498 And many needed to learn new skills, as the Land-Girls did. Plus this has the advantage of encouraging those who were retired or considered themselves no longer needed to "pitch in".
I started off in the late ‘70s helping my grandad and his mates. My job initially was managing the fires to burn the brush. I then progressed onto dressing the stakes and binders before eventually clearing out ahead of the layers then laying hedges myself. Still doing it now and loving it. 👍👍👍
All a tractor and hedge cutter do is trim the top. Next time you go in the country side look at the hedges most if no all have gaping gaps in the base because laying is never done. Easier to run mesh wire fences beside them or grub the hedge out entirely.
These days its probably cheaper and certainly quicker for one person in a tractor to cut the hedges than it would be to pay two or three hedge layers to do the same job, I used to do a fair bit of dry stone walling when I was younger and fitter, although grants are available to farmers to help pay for walling it is quicker and easier to run barbed wire where the walls had fallen these days.
Even with tractors and hedge cutters hedges are going to wrack and ruin round here because the council will only pay to have them cut once a year instead of twice. The bit about shading crops - even if the crop is just grass for sheep - is as true now as it was then.
They said they would burn the trimmings, and spread the ash to fertilized the field. No, that's not how we do it nowadays. You call up a chemical corporation, and they deliver a chemical fert that gets spread by a computer controlled tractor
@@MNpicker As nice as this sentiment is it's also nonsense. Men and women are genetically different and have evolved for different tasks. Just as there are some things most men can't do as well as a women can, the same is true in reverse. Obviously there will always be outliers.
Used to know a hedger. Said - Make the cut thick as a lamb's ear. He cut some nice walking sticks out when he came back to trim, years after first laying. Still have a nice chestnut one. True art.
1942. I was evacuated to Shaftsbury in Dorset and remember seeing this done. I have a book on Hedging and Ditching. Interesting stuff of skills before machinery made jobs easier and people fat.
Honestly we could really do with bringing some of these back, some modern techniques are actually worse at doing the job, faster doesn't always mean better
@@RunninUpThatHillh It looks like very few do those tasks when you look at the size of the present population compared to the days of hedging and ditching :)
If the copyright have expired on that book, it would be a very interesting read. Over the north sea hedging seems to be a lost art (if it was ever here).
Godspeed, Anonymous Land-girl. You deserved a name. That said, I'd like to try this with hawthorn around my garden, thanks for making this film available!
Awesome way of leveling at the top. I guess that's mostly for aesthetic purposes. Keeping his pipe in his mouth through ALL this hard work? That man is HARDCORE!!
@@Sid1035 Nah, hitting the stakes down to firm everything up is the final bit to keep the hedge together. Snipping the top off the stakes is mainly aesthetic. It also means when you trim back the hedges after its grown back, you aren't going to hit a random tall stake with your slasher
Taught many a potential hedge-layer. Nice to see how it was done in earlier years and how it hasn’t changed. Apart from the chainsaw Pity it’s a dying art. Thanks for sharing
@@Sid1035 A chainsaw would last a minute in a thicket like that before hitting a rock or some old fencing. It wold be a danger. That's a wicked machete/axe the guys got, though. Would love having one like that.
Love watching this at our local ploughing competition, always a few gents doing their best. I only did a little myself when working for the forestry commission in the early 70s.
I would very much like to know what you mean by, or how you define, "beautiful English people"? We are a bastard mix of French, Spanish, Italian, Scandinavian, German, Mongolian and so many more. There is no such thing as a "true Brit".
@@pleatedskirt18 You are over thinking it. In order to be beautiful English people they only need to be 1 Beautiful, 2 English and 3 People. They are all 3 correct? The OP never said anything about other people not being beautiful.
What a brilliant illustration of proper land management and the utilization of established plant growth. Much brighter than dismantlement of all that entangled plant matter to later install a wooden fence row.
Ditching and Hedging... Sadly these essential jobs have all but died. Farmers have been incentivised to expand fields by filling in ditches and the water that now runs off instead ofwater captured,slowed and allowed to filter through into the aquifers. Thus causing flooding and draught which has been an all to common site in Englands' recent history.
@@harrybrown4815 Alive and well in NW England. Chainsaws used, but work just as hard and get it done faster. More hedge renovated each year round here.
Speak for yourself. I take pride in my work (to my financial detriment) and have generally not known anyone who doesn't. Pride in your work is ruined by the avarice of the bosses.
I love the fact he uses just one tool and one glove that fits both hands for 90% of the work. No fat on this system at all, nice and lowtech. Nothing to go wrong, no noisy machines.
And it's all in-house. Nothing needs to be bought in, neither is anything taken away (robbed) from the land, any excess being burnt to provide potash for the land.
He's got two mitts. You can see his helper with both mitts at 7:03. But he's a very skilled worker for sure. Keeps his pipe in his mouth for most of it too!
@@AlexAlcyone Derro Farm spoke of "bending the assistant over at lunchtime". The assistant in this video is female. If you don't see why that is a disgusting, sexist, rapey, repulsive sniggering foul remark, then you must be seeing too much of yourself in it to condemn. Which makes me disgusted at you too.
What a BEAUTIFUL video. I love how nice, tidy and elegant the man doing the fence looks with his pipe working hard. The girl is adorable as well. Great knowledge, will give it a shot in my farm.
Wonderful. These two souls so far apart in years, yet working and learning together. She, learning old country skills. He, learning about how young people see things perhaps, and how girls in particular aren't as weak as they were portrayed. I hope she had a wonderful life with much happiness. I hope he lived long and enjoyed his pints down in the local pub. All this tranquility in a world gone mad.
I was always a Time Team fan and I often wondered about the sheer number of old ditches that they'd encounter at their sites. Now I see the ditch and hedging in combination and it completely makes sense. This is such a wonderfully useful, environmentally responsible, and absolutely ancient technique for land management.
We love this video! If anyone would like to find out if the techniques have changed much over the years, we run loads of hedge-laying activities across the UK.
What a great video. He's working hard but makes it look so easy and natural -- all the while wearing a vest, tie and watch chain. So much honor in a good day's work.
Agree. And if any non-Americans are puzzled here, may I remind us that the American 'vest' is not the same thing as the English 'vest'. It means 'waistcoat'.
I needed that. I grew up in the Kent hop feilds, I would "help" the old chaps cut hazel staves for fencing. "Coppicing" was always a joy to watch......not sure if they still do it now.
Saw them doing it near Broadlands in Romsey a few years ago, fascinating to see. The men doing it were pretty young too, so hopefully the skill is still being taught.
Amazing to see! I occasionally remove hedgerows in Western Illinois with an excavator. They are always sprawling trees that reach out from the row 30 feet or more. Never imagined that was what the row was supposed to look like. It’s been a long time since anyone put that kind of work into a hedge in the U.S.
I have done this. What people may not know is there regional styles of hedgelaying and corresponding different types of billhook. I learned to do it in Yorkshire but in Cheshire l was told it was the wrong way! It is very satisfying to see a hedge you laid years ago as they grow to be a very dense barrier full of birds.
I've had the privalage of hedge laying. I was in my early 20s. It's great to be out in the fresh air and do something you actually see the results of for years to come. 🇬🇧
The good ol days when even the most manual labor job was well respected. Now a days if you haven't figured out how to exploit the next guy for your own profit then you ain't nobody.
I used to drive on a country road on my way to work. When they cut the hedges with a mechanical cutter they completely mangled the hedge. I enjoyed this video because it shows people doing a good job. Everything nowadays is about speed and ease of doing something. There's very little craftsmanship and skill involved.
Are you implying you want to go back to the days when a laborer like this would spend all day on a project that could be done by a machine in minutes? I don't.
@@smhdpt12 the day will hopefully come when people respect nature and not treat it as a commodity. And yes I would rather see a well laid hedge that is a haven for wildlife than a shredded eyesore that is no good for no one.
I done this work when i was 16 yo it was by no means hard work in fact it was seriously satisfying work .in fact the first day when i went up the field i just thought we were going to put up a fence but i got my eyes opened . I suppose you could say (i was the old mans assistant)
that is one fit grandpa. My great grandpa would make railroad ties with an axe and sell the greenwood ties to the railroad for extra spending money. My Dad remembers seeing him heave a greenwood (wet wood, not yet seasoned and dried) tie over his shoulder and carry it. The ties Prob weighed 170 or 180 pounds. Great vibe from these old documentaries
I'm a little embarrassed to admit that I was fascinated by this video. I couldn't help thinking that it's really rather efficient. Yes, it takes a lot of time initially, but maintenance is pretty infrequent, the waste is put to good use, and it certainly saves trips to the gym.
I came across a video of pleachered hedges years ago, and i'll tell you, I had an instantaneous attraction to it. I actually have since laid some of the over growth along my yard and believe me when i say for the first year or so there isn't anything else in nature that looks as pleasing as fresh laid hedge. It just sucks that I don't have access to 'good' hedging shrubs. In the SE U.S. most of our natural foliage has been displaced by invasive asian species brought over as ornamentals which have escaped. I most of my hedging with yaupon holly, which is a wild-grained hardwood and i've lost many a pleacher. Whats funny is watching this video and seeing this old guy just go to town with a billhook, when you watch videos of modern-day conservationists laying hedge, they have a saw, a billhook, an axe, a hammer, a pruning saw, a chainsaw, lopping shears, pruning shears, and they're quite slow, almost like students waiting for a teacher to correct them. And then there's the hedger in this video... Just swinging that slasher like a fucking behemoth.
The sign of a true artisan; needing few tools to achieve the best result. I agree -- the knowledge we've lost is not to our advantage, is it. The result is useful, beautiful and durable. Wish we had more of this in the States. Imagine -- hedgerows like these were one of the deadly obstacles in WW II when the Allies came inland after D-Day. An ingenious mechanic came up with the idea of affixing a device in front of a tank to beat down the hedgerows to allow the infantry to follow (with additional tanks). It was no small job, and no wonder.
OceanSwimmer well, in France they used stones in their hedges as well. Stones from the fields (typically found with a plow) were thrown into the hedges. Couple centuries of this resulted in hedges being quite thick rock and wood barriers. The implement used by the tanks was a digging apparatus. A bar with several spears (basically a big pitch fork) so it could be driven into the root zone easily and grubbed out. In a related aspect, had the Europeans who were settling the American south kept this style of barrier instead of adopting split rail fence because of plentiful timber, ease of installation, and minimum maintenance, the civil war may have been a vastly different conflict. Without fences, farms don't exist. If you can't contain animals in some space, or exclude them from others, you don't have a farm. So when the union army marched south, they needed large amounts of fuel wood to cook. The easily portable, dry, seasoned wood which made spilt rails became a prime target. The invaders would tear out huge swaths of fence to use for cooking and heating, leaving civil farmers unable to contain live stock or exclude grazing of grain or fiber fields. It caused such an immediate societal collapse, which most heavily affected the lowest classes and blacks, that to save some face, Lincoln drafted an executive order dictating that units could only take a certain amount of rails, and only from the uppermost course. This did little to change anything. The units would just take the top rail, then move on, then retreat and take what was then the top rail, but used to be a lower course, they'd regroup and move into an area again, again harvesting from the then top rail, until the fence was functionally useless. The old saying good fences make good neighbors is an understatement, without fences there is no civilization. It's my belief, and history kinda corroborates this, had the Americans stuck with traditional hedge fencing, the many of these complications and deaths could have been avoided.
Thank you for the additional information - I was completely unaware that rocks were used in the hedgerows; as you mention, had the South continued using this method, it would have put an entirely different face on the conflict. Perhaps even changing the outcome. We lost 2 family members in that war: a young boy about 13, and his grandfather were rounded up (with others) by Union troops, marched into the woods and shot. Family recovered the bones when they identified the hand-carved wooden buttons on their clothes. God help us if we have another one.
OceanSwimmer it's my firm belief that the appearance of pleached hedges was for a military purpose. According to the best research, these hedges didn't exist in the British isles prior to the Roman invasion. It is my belief that the Roman army would move into a natural copse (one maintained by grazing omnivores and herbivores [this is called over-grazed terrain today] ) and then lay perimeter hedge as a barrier to the camp. To serve much the same function as concertina wire in the modern age. Britons would see this and either replicate the idea, or move in to abandoned camps. As the Britons began to separate themselves from their livestock, they just continued the practice and it continued organically into tradition.
That's an absolutely beautiful agricultural tradition that's been lost in Spain. I am starting a hedge around my field using willows as first approach, then I am layering to root beautiful hawthorn trees. Hope to have a proper hedge in 10 years or so!
It's clear how sharp he keeps his tools! No need to make a physically demanding job even tougher with dull tools! It was also interesting seeing a land girl working with him! I just learned about them not long ago. The clothing she is wearing is a good match to the uniform as it was described.
That was a fantastic video, and you have to appreciate the skill of the man who done the work, and his assistant. Didn't he love his pipe, and why not.
I went to a rural primary school, and we used to visit characters like this, as such by the time I was 12, I understood and was semi competent in most rural crafts, I even knew how to thatch a roof. I then went to a secondary school in a town and struggled with the curriculum, so much so that at 16 I left having not completed my GCSE’s and failed the 4 subjects that I did attend the exam. However I did obtain city and guilds qualifications in craft design and technology. In this mad and very strange world that we find ourselves in, where the curriculum is focused on teaching children that they can identify as a tomato 🍅, I feel very strongly that instead, kids should be taught some real world skills like these, where they’d be able to focus their thoughts on being creative, and maybe grow a tomato than identify and become one..
@brashers759, I agree 100%. Jobs that create and support agriculture and home building.....we need these skills. Look at the beautiful result. BTW.....this explains why WW2 fighting in the fields of Europe was so difficult. Hedgerows hundreds of years old were an effective barrier until tank flails were used.
This is how I learnt my country skills working with and watching the old skilled countryman fisherman and keepers etc know people learn from me! Just a shame kids off today have best friends called phones!
This was the countryside I remember as a young lad. Sadly farmers took to open fields to gain more produce thus doing away with the hedgerows that supported animal life.
Same in the states. They used to have wide hedge rows which were an ecosystem for wildlife, but they wanted to get more land so they cut them razor thin and innefective
There are still some hedgers doing the work in the traditional method. Not a lot but enough to keep the craft working and in some areas it's begun to be used more because it's easier on the land than having heavy machinery packing the soil.
This technique is called a Plessis in French, goes back to Roman times, and is the root of the name of the French Town "Le Plessis Robinson" voilà every day is a day at school
I suspect it's pre-Roman, Celtic maybe. Caesar complained that the northern Gauls formed defensive works with hedges which made it impossible to use cavalry properly. I suspect he was describing hedges being used as field boundaries like this and didn't realise they were an agricultural structure.
The laid stems are called Pleachers in UK hedging which is probably a corruption of Plessis. There are many different regional styles of hedging in the UK from Devon and Cornwall to Yorkshire. Some use stakes like in the video, some don't. The NHLA (National Hedge Laying Association ) website has loads of info and in non covid times runs competitions.
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A stout slasher, a billhook, and a good sharp axe. I call that cutting-hedge technology.
WINNER!!!!!!
Groan... But I love it!! LOL
the best
Damnit, good one
(h)edgy very very hedgy
These old information films are always so very well produced. No filler, just the facts.
And they're not trying to sell you a VPN service!
with a name like _"Ministry of Information"_ it makes me think I'm gonna get a sermon 😂
Once upon a time, we didn't cater to people who didn't want to learn.
Precisely!
@@maxi-me It makes me think of Big Brother and 1984
My father taught me how to lay a hedge when I was a schoolboy. I've never forgot and laid my garden hedge in February. One of the most satisfying jobs in the countryside.
Where are you doing this? What location?
@JohnGlen502 You can only lay hedges in the winter until early spring so from November until late March when the sap rises. It can be seen in most areas of rural Britain and probably best to visit a competition such as the Young Farmers.
@@iantucker1433 I was just curious. I live in eastern South Dakota this is not something we've ever done here to my knowledge. But maybe in the eastern states that were settled much earlier.
@JohnGlen502 I was in New England last September and not something i noticed there. I'll ask my daughter if she noticed any hedging in West Virginia when she was there a few years ago. She stayed on a friend's farm where they rear horse for fox hunting so obviously British influence there. I live in Dorset in south-west England and hedge laying styles can change in different counties.
🤣🤮
I know nothing about hedge upkeep, but back in the 1980s I spent two years motorcycle touring throughout the UK, and a fair bit of Europe as well, always keeping to the small roads.
So I've spent thousands and thousands of hours riding alongside English hedgerows. I treasure the memories.
I've seen this a few times now. That hedger's easy looking style belies his skill and the razor sharp edge on his billhook! The film is both nostalgic and informative to the uninitiated. Thankfully hegelaying continues today, is being recognised as a real craft and there's a steady growth in interest.
I’m 23, hoping to leave my mundane office job in a year to take up hedgelaying
@@Johnb.78 it's been 6 months, what's the status?
@@emeltea33 I’m not laying hedges yet hahaha
@@Johnb.78 Are you laying hedges now. It's almost been a year.
@@greenghost6691 a few more months, it’s harder to get into than I thought!
…this hedger man is an utter success; he’s got outside work that keeps him fit, a job that’s productive, ecological, sustainable and a handsom practical woman as company
They tell us she's supplied by the land force, it's wartime in Britain and the men are distracted in other fields.
Don't forget that elegant pipe! He's styling while doing hard work. A true Renaissance man.
Handsome woman 😂, I'm sorry is that proper English you're referring to? I'm JK but seems to me, when a female without makeup and or is working physically labor, and in good shape is called handsome by the British, but if she be dressed up, then bequest a lady. So terminology is different. I'm just a dumb yank, sorry, also many here in the US say handsome woman when speaking about a homely female that's a good worker, so all the categories have me curious as I'm sure you understand
He probably died of lung, throat or tongue cancer, that pipe in his mouth looks so goofy.
@@shable1436 "handsome" woman..
apart from being simply a phrase out of fashion i think "handsom" is adequate to show respect to a woman who is at good work and simultaneously express arousal at the sight of her being so.
“handsom " i believe is sufficiently weighted, not overtly sexual, thus allowing her to ignore or enjoy my procreative hint whilst preserving our modesties
The ease with which Dyton cuts and trims the hedges gives some insight into how well this man knew how to sharpen a blade! It looks nearly effortless.
I love how you knew how to spell him name. I’ve never even heard it before.
I can remember being fascinated watching my dad do this around our property in the late 70's, and I can recall seeing old remnants of the stakes and binders buried deep in the hedge when I had to cut the hedge myself in 2000! That hedgerow still exists today.
Pauline, where is your farm? You still live around there. After watching this I began to wonder if I could go to my family’s farm and do a short stretch.
Actually a fascinating video. I watched the whole thing. Funny how the best stuff is always what you stumble across accidentally.
Huh... am I the only person here who searched for 'hedging' ?
j d 😀😀 This popped up by chance for me.
within the last year a had a youtube jag where I was watching videos about flax and turning it into linen, for like a week, and splitting rocks - big rocks.
gonna do a search for "whitewash" soon...
Serendipity.
....I’ve a craving to go out and make a hedge fence now.
I want me one of those Bill hooks and lovely lady’s.
That could almost be my English mother. She was a girl of 16 and volunteered for the Women's Land Army - so she left home and was billeted in that part of England. She told me later of all the hard work that she had to do and showed me photos of her in the uniform that you see in this video. I always remember her talking about all the hay she had to stack in the barns - and she always made sure her trousers were tucked in her boots so that the rats and mice would not run up her legs. She also said how cold it was in the winter. Sometime later in the war there was an Italian Prisoner of War Camp that was near the farm where she would work and Italians would help out on the farm. Her name was Margaret and she tells me they used to sing the song 'La Bella Margarita, so beautiful to see.......'
Great story and history for your family, be sure to pass it down. So much is lost every day from Japan, to England to the old ways in the USA. I’m only 50 and so much of what we did on the farm in PA is lost already, thank god for the Amish and Mennonites around here.
Nice story!
...Bella Margarita!!!
Speaking of Italian POWs, here's a great story about them I watched recently.
ruclips.net/video/39BhaqucJzg/видео.html
@@antoniodelrio1292 somehow I knew this was going to be Mark Felton even before I clicked on the link.
That's a nice story. Thanks for sharing!
Down here in Australia we got a lot of Italian POW's too. Many stayed here and made a good life and contribution to the nation.
Never took the pipe out of his mouth haha. This is a very interesting program and series. The Land Girl who was helping the Hedge Layer, was a program that put women on farms that were short handed due to men serving in WW2. For anyone that doesn’t know. The British were having a hard time producing enough food due to German blockades and war expense. So those farm programs really helped.
Thank you for that fact! I absolutely love these tidbits learned in the comment section.
And the jobs ladies took during WW2 efforts are fascinating to learn about. So much history is forgotten, or not valued as it should be.
The Land Girls, had, apparently, a slightly rough reputation. There is something insufferably prissy about Tories
Germans had the world potash supply. that's why farming suddenly became difficult. they had a monopoly
Thanks for the info, it's always good to know any history, especially during a trying time.
And probably because materials like barbed wire, metal posts and hardware were in short supply, needed for the war effort, the authorities were trying to encourage traditional fencing techniques.
I get such a bitter sweet feeling of nostalgia watching these old clips
Does give a sense that we have gone down the wrong path.
@@johnsmithers8913- hard to disagree with that!
This is still common practice so dont worry :) my boss still goes on about his slasher and bilge hook ;)
Memories of better times. We are living what our ancestors would have called a dystopia.
are they still actively hedging many farms at all these days?
I wish this was practiced in the USA. the ability to help keep bees and birds so the land is enriched is ingenious! as well as being a privacy and livestock block. and thats not even mentioning how edible these typically are w/elderberry, blackberry and other berry plants. or holly in the christmas time.
Just the opposite was practiced here in the U.S. in the 1960's onward. Trees and fences were taken out, and small ponds filled so that there was no impediment to the ever larger tractors used here. The ponds were natural and used by migrating waterfowl, the trees were important bird and small game habitat.
I have always heard about hedges in places like Europe and England but I never realized how complicated they were. I learned something today.
Some of them are hundreds of years old. There is a rule of thumb method for dating based on the number of species tree species. They are usually laid with hawthorn but near me holly is often used
I’ve been an admirer of people who can lay hedges all my life .
My first tool at fifteen was an Echo pruning chainsaw.I small saw with a ten inch bar .Every Saturday during my early teens I cleared the sides of our hedgerows .They had been neglected for decades and the brambles grew out ten feet from the banks of the hedges.
The enclosures act of the 1750, was the first big drive to regulate the ownership of land properly in Britain and Ireland .
Some of those hedges and ditches you pass are over two hundred years old .To me they are time capsules.
Every Christmas Day I clear a stretch of the road near my parents with two bad turns so that it’s safe for others for the rest of the year .There are some weak areas in it and after watching this video I’m going to apply this man’s system to them .
Apart from a war going on that must have been a lovely time .
I met lots of that generation when I was young and the men were gentlemen and the women ladies .God bless them
@wilfredwild,
What a heritage!
Thank you for sharing your story; American here with lots of respect for the skill of hedge laying.
Ew
I am 76 now, I used to do this job and many more when I was young working with my father. Dry stone walling was another one. This vid brings back memories, hands full of thorns! Good job in cold weather.
Very enjoyable video, and so clear in its instruction. Straightforward, no fuss, as was the way in the 1940s. The pipe was nice. And Molly definitely a delight.
I was taught this as a boy in Derbyshire, around 1960, from an old farmer. It's one of the most pleasing of occupations, and really nothing more is needed than these tools shown, a slasher and a billhook, though we had a bow saw for removing anything very big. I'm glad that chain saws, with their noise, were not deemed necessary then. There is some excuse, however, for modern hedge-layers having them, because these days they often have to deal with hedges that have been left for far too long, and have developed into small trees.
I remember that we often didn't bother with binding along the top. As the stakes - all of which were cut from the unwanted bits of the hedge - were initially threaded down, the layings were pushed to one side and another as the point passed, so that they were kept sprung reasonably tightly against the stake, and this generally kept them down and in place. For any awkward bits we'd cut a stake leaving a few inches of short side-branch on it here and there, which held the boughs down more directly. If the stake was strong enough we could drive it in upside-down, as it were, leaving an actual hook-shape on its [new] top end.
The old boy's billhook in this video obviously cuts extrememly well. A tip here is to grind off the shoulder on a new tool, where the manufacturer's original grinding or shaping meets the flat of the blade. I don't know if that's understandable. What is achieved is that the blade's cross-section, essentially a wedge-shape, becomes then a longer and thinner wedge. It's this wedging action, in its jamming of the blade and absorption of its momentum, that often is the main limit to one's ability to make large cuts easily with a new hook, especially with some of the recent cheap ones made in China. [I learned this later when employed as a tree climber/feller - another lovely job.] If you do this use a water-cooled grinding wheel if possible, otherwise go carefully and keep cooling the blade. Of course, in the field, the cutting edge has to always be kept well honed as well.
One other comment for anyone wanting to have a go - and it's worth trying on any kind of hedge plant, works perfectly well with an old privet hedge, for instance, or holly, or beech - it doesn't have to be hawthorn, as in most of the video. If the hedge is on a hillside, start at the higher end, so that there's no chance of any of the laid boughs ending up horizontal or even downwards, which could of course interfere with the natural upwards flow of their new sap in the spring.
Thank you for uploading the film. Really worthwhile to keep knowledge alive of these old things, all part of us still.
Rob Wilde I’m sure it was a company called Ewell that used to make the best hedge laying tools and different parts of the country have their own particular way or style of laying a hedge. Some of the hedges local to me (I’m in S. Lincolnshire) were laid about 7-8 years ago and they’re about 4 times the height now. 👍
wow thank you for adding to this. I've been trying to hedge an area with locust we've got coming up and it's really helpful information
Why not just plant blackberry as hedge ?
Interesting idea! But briars grow mainly by pulling themselves up other plants, that's the purpose of their backward-pointing hooks. They do grow into large clusters by themselves, it's true, if they can find nothing stouter to climb, but then they're only climbing up the adjacent briar, and the total mass has no bulk or strength. It might deter a human - because of the spikes - but cattle would just push through.@@Philip-hv2kc
My father won a national competition for hedge laying for under 16 year olds at around the time this film was made. Very interesting as it was one of the skills that I never had the opportunity of learning from him.
Dad was 12 years old then. He's 93 now, Former farmer. Hands like Cornish shovels, wrists and forearms like hickory, wit like a razor.
Is England still English where he lives?
Yeah who needs a gym
I don’t as I practice the old ways it’s more fun 👍🇬🇧
We need to go back.
No we don’t. That is hard work that would break your back in no time
Watching this wiry old gent was a pleasure to behold, he never seemed to break a sweat yet did a massive amount of arduous work.
Tea, bread and butter.
It's amazing that this was filmed in the middle of WWII as if everything was just fine. Have to love the Brits!
Remember that the Brits were being asked to get more and more productivity from the land during the war. Put into that context, this film is extremely important to the war effort.
That's probably why they filmed it. Many of the laborers were engaged in the war effort, so many others needed to pitch in in agricultural work.
@@marktrain9498 And many needed to learn new skills, as the Land-Girls did. Plus this has the advantage of encouraging those who were retired or considered themselves no longer needed to "pitch in".
ruclips.net/video/1nJr8Botu7E/видео.htmlsi=FbEVdhrhCJ3qqoJr
Just laying hedge while a the Luftwaffe flies over before being taken on by the RAF
Always hoped to be a hedger but I could never smoke a pipe properly.
Michael Igoe 😂😂👍
There is still time brother. Take up thy pipe and inhale
Should've hedged your bets
I'd be currious to know if hedges made briar pipes.
Old guys...
I started off in the late ‘70s helping my grandad and his mates. My job initially was managing the fires to burn the brush. I then progressed onto dressing the stakes and binders before eventually clearing out ahead of the layers then laying hedges myself. Still doing it now and loving it. 👍👍👍
A true craftsman at work. Sadly a sight rarely seen now. A tractor and hedge cutter can never replace a skill like this.
All a tractor and hedge cutter do is trim the top. Next time you go in the country side look at the hedges most if no all have gaping gaps in the base because laying is never done. Easier to run mesh wire fences beside them or grub the hedge out entirely.
These days its probably cheaper and certainly quicker for one person in a tractor to cut the hedges than it would be to pay two or three hedge layers to do the same job, I used to do a fair bit of dry stone walling when I was younger and fitter, although grants are available to farmers to help pay for walling it is quicker and easier to run barbed wire where the walls had fallen these days.
Even with tractors and hedge cutters hedges are going to wrack and ruin round here because the council will only pay to have them cut once a year instead of twice. The bit about shading crops - even if the crop is just grass for sheep - is as true now as it was then.
@Colin Norman Yes I've seen those tractor-borne cutting machines in action; terrifying, giant razor-like apparatus that leaves ragged cuts.
They said they would burn the trimmings, and spread the ash to fertilized the field. No, that's not how we do it nowadays. You call up a chemical corporation, and they deliver a chemical fert that gets spread by a computer controlled tractor
Pure, practical information... no pretenses, just results. Love it.
A pleasure to watch. From the Soil to the Soil. Nothing wasted.
I wish I could have shared this with my dad. He loved traditions and skills such as these.
Well, it's up to you to keep those interests alive and to pass it on to your descendants. All the best.
I really enjoyed this...the narrator was great describing who the people are and how they did their job. So happy I decided to watch this.
@Percy Harry Hotspur Who are you thinking of and who is 'young Pip'?
Harry Enfield
@Percy Harry Hotspur As a Northumbrian, I like your name.
We need people like that more than ever, what a craftsman and his assistant of course...
*apprentice 😎
@Colin Norman not those girls..the girls that want to work...learn and succeed in life..girls can do anything guys can do..sometimes better 😎
Stop! Ask Ahmed and Pajet, they will help you
@@MNpicker As nice as this sentiment is it's also nonsense. Men and women are genetically different and have evolved for different tasks. Just as there are some things most men can't do as well as a women can, the same is true in reverse. Obviously there will always be outliers.
Used to know a hedger. Said - Make the cut thick as a lamb's ear. He cut some nice walking sticks out when he came back to trim, years after first laying. Still have a nice chestnut one. True art.
He was a quick worker and casually skilful
Good technique and a sharp bit of kit, he certainly knew his stuff.
Skilled workers, her in her overall, him in his pants, shirt, necktie, vest, coat, hat, and pipe. Those were the days!
Vest is called a gurken.
Thanks! @@michaelthomas7178
@@TheLdoggett jerking correct spelling.
@@TheLdoggett jerking correct spelling.
Jerkin.
1942. I was evacuated to Shaftsbury in Dorset and remember seeing this done. I have a book on Hedging and Ditching. Interesting stuff of skills before machinery made jobs easier and people fat.
Honestly we could really do with bringing some of these back, some modern techniques are actually worse at doing the job, faster doesn't always mean better
Eh there's always tasks around to keep us lean.
@@RunninUpThatHillh It looks like very few do those tasks when you look at the size of the present population compared to the days of hedging and ditching :)
If the copyright have expired on that book, it would be a very interesting read. Over the north sea hedging seems to be a lost art (if it was ever here).
@@rolfnilsen6385 don't say terrible things like that I have a space on my bookshelf and now it's tempting me to find out
Godspeed, Anonymous Land-girl. You deserved a name.
That said, I'd like to try this with hawthorn around my garden, thanks for making this film available!
Awesome way of leveling at the top. I guess that's mostly for aesthetic purposes.
Keeping his pipe in his mouth through ALL this hard work?
That man is HARDCORE!!
NO it was the final thing to keep the hedge together until it 'grew in' the following year
@@Sid1035 Nah, hitting the stakes down to firm everything up is the final bit to keep the hedge together. Snipping the top off the stakes is mainly aesthetic. It also means when you trim back the hedges after its grown back, you aren't going to hit a random tall stake with your slasher
I do a bit of hedge laying, I wish I had the skill this man had, it definitely isn’t as easy as her made it look. Great video by the way.
Taught many a potential hedge-layer. Nice to see how it was done in earlier years and how it hasn’t changed. Apart from the chainsaw
Pity it’s a dying art. Thanks for sharing
I really don't think i could make such an art of it with a chainsaw.
@@Sid1035 A chainsaw would last a minute in a thicket like that before hitting a rock or some old fencing. It wold be a danger. That's a wicked machete/axe the guys got, though. Would love having one like that.
@@soulscanner66 it's called a Billhook.
Love watching this at our local ploughing competition, always a few gents doing their best. I only did a little myself when working for the forestry commission in the early 70s.
Hard work and a stout heart.....They don't make them like that any more. Excellent video, thoroughly enjoyed it.
Beautiful English people in beautiful England .
Aye.
I would very much like to know what you mean by, or how you define, "beautiful English people"? We are a bastard mix of French, Spanish, Italian, Scandinavian, German, Mongolian and so many more. There is no such thing as a "true Brit".
@@pleatedskirt18Yes,there is - the Welsh
@@pleatedskirt18
You are over thinking it. In order to be beautiful English people they only need to be 1 Beautiful, 2 English and 3 People. They are all 3 correct? The OP never said anything about other people not being beautiful.
@@pleatedskirt18 We are all mutts. So there is a "True Brit" in every English person accepting the culture.
What a brilliant illustration of proper land management and the utilization of established plant growth. Much brighter than dismantlement of all that entangled plant matter to later install a wooden fence row.
somehow he makes this difficult task look easy. they both take pride in there jobs which is rare these days.
On a positive note, this guy and his assistant show great pride in their work.
I agree
Ditching and Hedging...
Sadly these essential jobs have all but died. Farmers have been incentivised to expand fields by filling in ditches and the water that now runs off instead ofwater captured,slowed and allowed to filter through into the aquifers. Thus causing flooding and draught which has been an all to common site in Englands' recent history.
@@harrybrown4815 Alive and well in NW England. Chainsaws used, but work just as hard and get it done faster. More hedge renovated each year round here.
Speak for yourself. I take pride in my work (to my financial detriment) and have generally not known anyone who doesn't. Pride in your work is ruined by the avarice of the bosses.
I love the fact he uses just one tool and one glove that fits both hands for 90% of the work. No fat on this system at all, nice and lowtech. Nothing to go wrong, no noisy machines.
Only thing id recommend extra is a Rake.
That blade is super sharp too‼️ Sliced through those shoots like butter ⚠️
Ajax Telamonian
8:11
And it's all in-house. Nothing needs to be bought in, neither is anything taken away (robbed) from the land, any excess being burnt to provide potash for the land.
He's got two mitts. You can see his helper with both mitts at 7:03. But he's a very skilled worker for sure. Keeps his pipe in his mouth for most of it too!
No current farmers in Illinois do this. If anything, they buy trackhoes and tear out every fence row around then wonder where all the wildlife went.
They want that extra few inches to plant. Don't care about erosion that the next generation problem.
The weaving of the binders at the top of a laid hedge is one of the most satisfying jobs there is in the countryside!
@Derro Farm Well, that really depends on who the assistant is. If it is a portly, 17 stone, in- bred, hairy-arsed bloke called Bob, perhaps not!
@@portcullis5622 is his wife called Eleri and his ringtone "i have a brand new combine harvester"? if so i know him! lol.
@Derro Farm That is a sexist, repulsive thing to say, and you should be ashamed of yourself. You make me sick.
@@AlexAlcyone Derro Farm spoke of "bending the assistant over at lunchtime". The assistant in this video is female. If you don't see why that is a disgusting, sexist, rapey, repulsive sniggering foul remark, then you must be seeing too much of yourself in it to condemn. Which makes me disgusted at you too.
Sorry things didn't work out for you and Bob.
What a BEAUTIFUL video. I love how nice, tidy and elegant the man doing the fence looks with his pipe working hard. The girl is adorable as well. Great knowledge, will give it a shot in my farm.
Fantastic looking hedge. Being a forestry contractor it's a skill I'd love to have. Something worth looking into
This video seriously cheers me up, it's a thing of beauty
Wonderful.
These two souls so far apart in years, yet working and learning together.
She, learning old country skills.
He, learning about how young people see things perhaps, and how girls in particular aren't as weak as they were portrayed.
I hope she had a wonderful life with much happiness.
I hope he lived long and enjoyed his pints down in the local pub.
All this tranquility in a world gone mad.
I was always a Time Team fan and I often wondered about the sheer number of old ditches that they'd encounter at their sites. Now I see the ditch and hedging in combination and it completely makes sense. This is such a wonderfully useful, environmentally responsible, and absolutely ancient technique for land management.
A Wonderfull Trip Back In Time And A must See for Us Hedgelayers of Today.
Robbo Wilson I started out like this 50yrs.ago, but after the first few days I invested in a chainsaw
We love this video! If anyone would like to find out if the techniques have changed much over the years, we run loads of hedge-laying activities across the UK.
6:17 She's wearing a tie, just as he is. That would make this a formal hedging event. 🐧💙🐧
What a great video. He's working hard but makes it look so easy and natural -- all the while wearing a vest, tie and watch chain. So much honor in a good day's work.
Agree. And if any non-Americans are puzzled here, may I remind us that the American 'vest' is not the same thing as the English 'vest'. It means 'waistcoat'.
I needed that.
I grew up in the Kent hop feilds, I would "help" the old chaps cut hazel staves for fencing. "Coppicing" was always a joy to watch......not sure if they still do it now.
Glad this video came up again. Saw it three years ago and enjoyed a refresher.
A dying art rarely seen today. However there are people about who still do it in the part of Hampshire I live in.
Geoff T I see it here in east Kent now and again too.
And in Bedfordshire where I spent my teens in Pertenhall...and still have the blackthorn spikes embedded in my skin.....
Saw them doing it near Broadlands in Romsey a few years ago, fascinating to see. The men doing it were pretty young too, so hopefully the skill is still being taught.
Amazing to see! I occasionally remove hedgerows in Western Illinois with an excavator.
They are always sprawling trees that reach out from the row 30 feet or more.
Never imagined that was what the row was supposed to look like.
It’s been a long time since anyone put that kind of work into a hedge in the U.S.
Jeremy in the UK they are protected and cannot be removed because of the wildlife that inhabit them.
I have done this. What people may not know is there regional styles of hedgelaying and corresponding different types of billhook. I learned to do it in Yorkshire but in Cheshire l was told it was the wrong way! It is very satisfying to see a hedge you laid years ago as they grow to be a very dense barrier full of birds.
This and films like it are a treasure.
"hedges are always trying to grow into trees"
know your place hedges
Lol
idiot! no idea do you grrrr!
I agree whole heartedly❤✨
You got a laugh out of me!
This made me out-loud-chuckle
Beautiful, man and nature working together.
I've had the privalage of hedge laying. I was in my early 20s. It's great to be out in the fresh air and do something you actually see the results of for years to come. 🇬🇧
This gentleman was a real expert.
The good ol days when even the most manual labor job was well respected. Now a days if you haven't figured out how to exploit the next guy for your own profit then you ain't nobody.
Not sure that job was as "well respected" as you may think. All societies have hierarchies.
Anybody with a legit full time job is respectable imo
The job seemed to be focused on using only natural items. No need for any supplies other than tools! Very cool!
The labor was outsourced. He didn't own that farm.
Bob, I understand your sentiment.
Those days are sadly gone.
I love to watch and learn about stuff like this. An art lost forever now I'm afraid.
Not at all people are still playing this trade and there are plenty willing to learn
A nation built on pride in your work, wonderful to behold. How things have changed.
Fantastic. A far cry from the butchery that goes on today.
I used to drive on a country road on my way to work. When they cut the hedges with a mechanical cutter they completely mangled the hedge. I enjoyed this video because it shows people doing a good job. Everything nowadays is about speed and ease of doing something. There's very little craftsmanship and skill involved.
Are you implying you want to go back to the days when a laborer like this would spend all day on a project that could be done by a machine in minutes? I don't.
@@smhdpt12 the day will hopefully come when people respect nature and not treat it as a commodity. And yes I would rather see a well laid hedge that is a haven for wildlife than a shredded eyesore that is no good for no one.
Oh wow! This is beautiful! Amazing to see how well this man uses those tools. People really worked so hard in the past.
I done this work when i was 16 yo it was by no means hard work in fact it was seriously satisfying work .in fact the first day when i went up the field i just thought we were going to put up a fence but i got my eyes opened . I suppose you could say (i was the old mans assistant)
What a pleasure to watch, a true master of his craft, and I like that his comely young assistant is being taught the trade as well.
My Grandad was still laying hedges well into his 70’s in Kent.
This is a lost art now
Nice to see some one who had a family member who did nice stuff back in the day ! If I may ask, what is the common plant to plant for hedging ???
That is interesting. I used to live in Herne Bay and was born in Chatham. Live in Weymouth Dorset now
Still goes on all around the UK. Different styles in different regions. www.hedgelaying.org.uk/
I've seen modern explanations of this art, but this film explains it much better to my brain. This is great. Thanks!
Me too! Judging by the many complimentary comments here, other viewers feel the same way.
Fran there's an excellent group on Fbook, are you on there too?
@@glynhannaford7332 No, but thanks anyway. Luckily there is youtube :)
that is one fit grandpa. My great grandpa would make railroad ties with an axe and sell the greenwood ties to the railroad for extra spending money. My Dad remembers seeing him heave a greenwood (wet wood, not yet seasoned and dried) tie over his shoulder and carry it. The ties Prob weighed 170 or 180 pounds. Great vibe from these old documentaries
Good ol Northamptonshire camped there last year, it was almost like waking up in a Constable painting
Third time I’m watching this in the past year. Thank you for posting.
I'm a little embarrassed to admit that I was fascinated by this video. I couldn't help thinking that it's really rather efficient. Yes, it takes a lot of time initially, but maintenance is pretty infrequent, the waste is put to good use, and it certainly saves trips to the gym.
I came across a video of pleachered hedges years ago, and i'll tell you, I had an instantaneous attraction to it. I actually have since laid some of the over growth along my yard and believe me when i say for the first year or so there isn't anything else in nature that looks as pleasing as fresh laid hedge. It just sucks that I don't have access to 'good' hedging shrubs. In the SE U.S. most of our natural foliage has been displaced by invasive asian species brought over as ornamentals which have escaped. I most of my hedging with yaupon holly, which is a wild-grained hardwood and i've lost many a pleacher.
Whats funny is watching this video and seeing this old guy just go to town with a billhook, when you watch videos of modern-day conservationists laying hedge, they have a saw, a billhook, an axe, a hammer, a pruning saw, a chainsaw, lopping shears, pruning shears, and they're quite slow, almost like students waiting for a teacher to correct them. And then there's the hedger in this video... Just swinging that slasher like a fucking behemoth.
The sign of a true artisan; needing few tools to achieve the best result. I agree -- the knowledge we've lost is not to our advantage, is it. The result is useful, beautiful and durable. Wish we had more of this in the States.
Imagine -- hedgerows like these were one of the deadly obstacles in WW II when the Allies came inland after D-Day. An ingenious mechanic came up with the idea of affixing a device in front of a tank to beat down the hedgerows to allow the infantry to follow (with additional tanks). It was no small job, and no wonder.
OceanSwimmer well, in France they used stones in their hedges as well. Stones from the fields (typically found with a plow) were thrown into the hedges. Couple centuries of this resulted in hedges being quite thick rock and wood barriers. The implement used by the tanks was a digging apparatus. A bar with several spears (basically a big pitch fork) so it could be driven into the root zone easily and grubbed out.
In a related aspect, had the Europeans who were settling the American south kept this style of barrier instead of adopting split rail fence because of plentiful timber, ease of installation, and minimum maintenance, the civil war may have been a vastly different conflict. Without fences, farms don't exist. If you can't contain animals in some space, or exclude them from others, you don't have a farm. So when the union army marched south, they needed large amounts of fuel wood to cook. The easily portable, dry, seasoned wood which made spilt rails became a prime target. The invaders would tear out huge swaths of fence to use for cooking and heating, leaving civil farmers unable to contain live stock or exclude grazing of grain or fiber fields. It caused such an immediate societal collapse, which most heavily affected the lowest classes and blacks, that to save some face, Lincoln drafted an executive order dictating that units could only take a certain amount of rails, and only from the uppermost course. This did little to change anything. The units would just take the top rail, then move on, then retreat and take what was then the top rail, but used to be a lower course, they'd regroup and move into an area again, again harvesting from the then top rail, until the fence was functionally useless. The old saying good fences make good neighbors is an understatement, without fences there is no civilization. It's my belief, and history kinda corroborates this, had the Americans stuck with traditional hedge fencing, the many of these complications and deaths could have been avoided.
Thank you for the additional information - I was completely unaware that rocks were used in the hedgerows; as you mention, had the South continued using this method, it would have put an entirely different face on the conflict. Perhaps even changing the outcome. We lost 2 family members in that war: a young boy about 13, and his grandfather were rounded up (with others) by Union troops, marched into the woods and shot. Family recovered the bones when they identified the hand-carved wooden buttons on their clothes. God help us if we have another one.
OceanSwimmer it's my firm belief that the appearance of pleached hedges was for a military purpose. According to the best research, these hedges didn't exist in the British isles prior to the Roman invasion. It is my belief that the Roman army would move into a natural copse (one maintained by grazing omnivores and herbivores [this is called over-grazed terrain today] ) and then lay perimeter hedge as a barrier to the camp. To serve much the same function as concertina wire in the modern age. Britons would see this and either replicate the idea, or move in to abandoned camps. As the Britons began to separate themselves from their livestock, they just continued the practice and it continued organically into tradition.
The hedger reminds me so much of my grandfather, pipe and all. lovely and informative video, thank you.
This is AMAZING. Like, this is something I've literally NEVER THOUGHT ABOUT but it's so fascinating!!! Thanks for posting this!
That's an absolutely beautiful agricultural tradition that's been lost in Spain. I am starting a hedge around my field using willows as first approach, then I am layering to root beautiful hawthorn trees. Hope to have a proper hedge in 10 years or so!
It's clear how sharp he keeps his tools! No need to make a physically demanding job even tougher with dull tools!
It was also interesting seeing a land girl working with him! I just learned about them not long ago. The clothing she is wearing is a good match to the uniform as it was described.
Tools kept sharp using sand and a belt!
That was a fantastic video, and you have to appreciate the skill of the man who done the work, and his assistant. Didn't he love his pipe, and why not.
I never even knew this was a thing. I guess I thought hedges just grew magically.
The finished job IS a pleasure to look at!
This is fascinating.
And what a lovely, hardy and capable young lady his assistant is.
Fascinating stuff. Those tools had to have been razor sharp to perform like that.
My father worked laying hedges in the 30s and was paid by the chain (22 yards).
I went to a rural primary school, and we used to visit characters like this, as such by the time I was 12, I understood and was semi competent in most rural crafts, I even knew how to thatch a roof. I then went to a secondary school in a town and struggled with the curriculum, so much so that at 16 I left having not completed my GCSE’s and failed the 4 subjects that I did attend the exam. However I did obtain city and guilds qualifications in craft design and technology. In this mad and very strange world that we find ourselves in, where the curriculum is focused on teaching children that they can identify as a tomato 🍅, I feel very strongly that instead, kids should be taught some real world skills like these, where they’d be able to focus their thoughts on being creative, and maybe grow a tomato than identify and become one..
Good points indeed. 😊
🍅 indeed.
@brashers759,
I agree 100%.
Jobs that create and support agriculture and home building.....we need these skills.
Look at the beautiful result.
BTW.....this explains why WW2 fighting in the fields of Europe was so difficult. Hedgerows hundreds of years old were an effective barrier until tank flails were used.
Unfortunately, the Marxist left want chaos to seize control. But ya couldn’t agree more
Here! Here! to that sentiment! 👍🏻
Such a joy to see a craftsman of the era doing a job properly. Good luck finding that today...
This is very interesting! A living fence! Love it!
This is how I learnt my country skills working with and watching the old skilled countryman fisherman and keepers etc know people learn from me! Just a shame kids off today have best friends called phones!
This was the countryside I remember as a young lad. Sadly farmers took to open fields to gain more produce thus doing away with the hedgerows that supported animal life.
Same in the states. They used to have wide hedge rows which were an ecosystem for wildlife, but they wanted to get more land so they cut them razor thin and innefective
There are still some hedgers doing the work in the traditional method. Not a lot but enough to keep the craft working and in some areas it's begun to be used more because it's easier on the land than having heavy machinery packing the soil.
This technique is called a Plessis in French, goes back to Roman times, and is the root of the name of the French Town "Le Plessis Robinson" voilà every day is a day at school
I suspect it's pre-Roman, Celtic maybe. Caesar complained that the northern Gauls formed defensive works with hedges which made it impossible to use cavalry properly. I suspect he was describing hedges being used as field boundaries like this and didn't realise they were an agricultural structure.
The laid stems are called Pleachers in UK hedging which is probably a corruption of Plessis. There are many different regional styles of hedging in the UK from Devon and Cornwall to Yorkshire. Some use stakes like in the video, some don't. The NHLA (National Hedge Laying Association ) website has loads of info and in non covid times runs competitions.
Heard it called plashing in Ireland, better known as a 17th century battle tactic, used to funnel an enemy army into ambush.
@@Tedo234 Interesting, so Pleachers are laid stems. So when people sit in Bleachers they are laid flat benches. Funny how ideas and words are created.
As a professional landscaper I can say I surely learned some things from this video that I will use in my day to day workings.
Just bought the latest Land-Girl Calendar - sadly, its pages are empty
I thought I found a copy but it was a Land-Whale Calendar instead. I put it back.
@@Catubrannos Surprised you were even able to pick it up!
That's Awesome! This guy was a true craftsman and great job in teaching during a very difficult and dangerous time in history.
Great job I remember Dad doing it back in the 1950s to keep the cattle in. 👍🇬🇧
what a marvellous job, both the hedger and the film makers
Seriously, you have to be in good shape to do this.
Doing this gets, and keeps you in good shape.
Back then people weren't sitting or laying down for most of the day watching RUclips videos :/
Except for the tar in the lungs
@HellsSgt Sure and they die young leaving a nice healthy corpse.
@HellsSgt 😄Stay safe
I truly love this film!