Simon & Schuster £20
What does it mean to lay a hedge? I can just about explain that it is a traditional way of half-cutting the stems of a hedge and laying them on their sides to rejuvenate the greenery. But I didn’t realise that a few people still make a living from it.
Paul Lamb is one of those special people and he has written a gentle, evocative and compelling account of his hedgelaying year.
Poor old hedges. It’s amazing that Britain still has a trove of them when half were grubbed out in the second half of the 20th century. Today, many survivors are in a sorry state, gappy, bedraggled or brutalised by a bloke on a tractor
with a mechanical flail. We learn from Lamb that this crude mechanised maintenance won’t maintain a hedge in peak condition like a traditional lay, which should occur every 15 or 20 years.
In recent decades, hedges have made a bit of a comeback, valued as linear woodlands, vital habitat for nesting birds, with money available to replant them. But the idea of the hedge as an essential country item – to keep livestock where they should be – has continued to fade from consciousness.
Nevertheless, Lamb makes a living as a hedger and, following his success on Instagram, where 195,000 people follow his idyllic-looking pictures of his craft, here is the book about his working life.
Lamb begins his year in September, with a big job on a blackthorn hedge in Dorset. As he explains the ‘pleaching’ and his use of stakes and traditional regional styles – from the Midland hedge to the South of England style – we learn that a good hedger should be able to achieve a ‘chain’ of 66 feet in length in a day. It is slow, painstaking work.
His Instagram photos look lush, but the written word enables him to reveal harsher realities. Blackthorn and hawthorn easily penetrate leather work gloves – especially in the wet – and a hedger’s hands become progressively more splintered, swollen and sore as the winter working season becomes wetter and colder.
A technical account of hedgelaying would have limited appeal; Lamb’s story is also one of the changing seasons, the goldfinches, rooks and rural life he encounters.
It’s particularly appealing to romantics. He lives frugally in an old truck, with a woodburner, bed, sink, armchair and dresser in the back. He nurses his ancient vehicle from hedging contract to contract, living off-grid on the land where he works, an itinerant seasonal labourer without a permanent home.
We are drawn into this intriguing, enduring rural economy based around woods and woodwork. Today it is a cottage affair, but still suckering and shooting in its own way.
When the hedging season ends, Lamb works with a charcoal-producer, and then makes beautiful traditional fences with hazel he harvests from a coppice.
We are warmed by hot cups of tea, stews, cosy fires and brief, approving encounters with old-fashioned country characters in the mould of Lamb’s hedging mentor, Bill Bugler.
There is an occasionally mournful note about the changing nature of rural England: the decline of small family farms and the rise of horsey hobbyists and others with money from the cities.
Ironically, these nouveau ruralists are probably more likely to employ Lamb. Many want to revive their hedgerows in his wildlife-friendly way.
Sharing the long, dark nights with Lamb, we, the readers, begin to worry. His life is very solitary. Some weeks, he hardly sees another soul. At times, working in the mud and chill, in his late 40s, he becomes gloomy, and he admits to stresses in the past.
Is he lonely? Is he OK? He has grown-up daughters – but what’s
happened to his wife? There’s a little reassurance towards the end when we meet his daughters, and his ex-wife pops in for a friendly chat.
For all the intimacy of his portrait of his relationship with the land, Lamb keeps prying eyes at bay. Much remains private.
I long to hear more about his personal finances; how much his hedging ‘contracts’ pay; how he uses tech; whether he is single; what he does for a day off.
Thankfully, checking his Insta gives me a happy ending: Lamb is all smiles with a new partner. I’m sure his book will be a big success, too.
Patrick Barkham is The Oldie’s Taking a Walk columnist
