_Hedges in England--Plant and animal life--Stone hedges in
Cornwall--Effect of wind on trees--How hedges are made--Appearance of
stone hedges--An ancient hedge--Woody ivy--Signs of antiquity--An old
man's testimony._
|EVERY one in England knows what a hedge is--a row of thorn or other
hardy bushes originally planted to protect a field, which, when old
and unkept, has the appearance and character of a brake or thicket. It
consequently comes as a surprise when we first visit the remote and most
un-English county of Cornwall to discover that a hedge there may mean
something quite different. It puzzled me to read in a book on Cornwall
that in some exceedingly rough places near the coast one found it easier
to make one's way over the ground by climbing on to a hedge and walking
along its top.
The oldest, toughest, closest and most evenly-cut hedge one knows would
hardly afford a safe footing for a man; and as to attempting to get upon
or walk on a big unkept hedge, such as are common in the south and west
counties on this side the Tamar, the very thought of it is painful.
In imagination one sees, and seeing feels, oneself stuck fast in a big
bramble bush. In Cornwall I discovered that a stone wall was called a
hedge--the sort of wall which in Scotland I had been taught to call
a dyke. I did not like it so well as the English hedge, that
wild disordered tangle of all the most beautiful plants in these
islands--black and white thorn; privet with its small grape-like
clusters; yew and holly and ivy with late, honeyed blossoms for bees and
wasps and hornets; and briar and sweet-briar, bramble and briony; also
poisonous black briony and traveller's-joy, a green and silver tapestry;
and wayfaring tree, spindle-wood and cornel, with scarlet, purple and
orange-coloured berries; and dark deadly-nightshade, pushing its slender
stems up through the interlaced branches--all massed together for common
protection like a packed herd of wild swine on their defence in some
savage solitude, displaying bristling backs and bared gnashing tushes to
a hostile world.
They are--these wildings of the hedge--the counterparts in the vegetable
world of the creatures called "vermin" in the animal kingdom. In the
recesses of their thorny intertwining boughs, and deep down among their
tough ancient roots, the vermin, the banned ones, have their home and
refuge--the quaint hedgehog and minute long-nosed shrew; black and white
magpie and chacking, tail-shaking butcher-bird; adder and snake and
slow-worm; blood-sucking stoat and weasel with flat heads and serpentine
bodies, and their small quarry, rats and voles and pretty sharpnosed
wood-mice with leaf-like ear, and winter sleeping dormice.
It was fortunate that in the long ago, when our progenitors began to
take plots of ground for cultivation and pasture, they found out this
cheap ready way of marking their boundaries and safeguarding their
cattle and corn. We may say they planted better than they knew: they
planted once, and many and many a hedge--unnumbered miles and leagues of
hedges--that are now great belts of thicket, were first planted by man
in the remote past. Nature took over the thin row of thorn seedlings
and made it what it is, not only the useful thing it was intended for--a
natural barbed-wire entanglement--but a thing of beauty and a joy for
ever.
In West Cornwall, where I first came to know the native hedge, they
cannot have these belts of thicket, rich in a varied plant and animal
life. It is a country of moors and rugged stony hills where nothing
flourishes but heath and furze and bracken. The farming folk have
succeeded in long time in creating small arable and grass fields in the
midst of this desolation, but they cannot grow trees on account of the
violent winds charged with salt moisture that blow incessantly from the
Atlantic. If the farmer plants a few trees so that he may one day eat
an apple of his own growing and sit in the shade, he must build a wall
eight or ten feet high to protect them from the salt blast, and he may
then die of old age before the apple is ripe or the shade created. Nor
can he grow a hedge: the furze, it is true, abounds everywhere, but it
is a most intractable plant that will go (or grow) its own wild way, and
no man has yet subdued it to his will and made it serve as a hedge. Yet
even in this wind-vexed land a few self-planted trees may be seen.
You find them in the strip of farm country between the hills and sea,
in hollows and under high banks, or where a mass of rock affords them
shelter; and they are mostly hawthorns and blackthorns with a few hardy
bush-like trees of other kinds. They are like the trees and bushes on
the most exposed coasts in Yorkshire and in other places, growing all
one way, lying close to and sometimes actually on the ground, stretching
out their branches and every twig towards the inland country. The sight
of these wind-tormented, one-sided trees fascinates me and I stay long
to look at them.
A bristled tree
With branches cedared by the salten gale,
Stretched back, as if with wings that cannot flee,
is how Gordon Hake describes the appearance, seeing, as I do, the desire
and struggle to escape--to fly from that pitiless persecution. But the
"wings" I do not see: in summer the foliage is to my sight but a ragged
mantle; in winter the human expression is strongest and most pathetic.
Held by the feet in the grip of earth, the beaten bush strains to get
away; it suggests the figure of a person crawling, or trying to crawl,
the knee-like joints on the ground, the body-like trunk thrown forward,
the long bare branches and terminal twigs, like the brown, thin naked
arms and claw-like opened fingers of a starving scourged slave in the
tropics, extended imploringly towards the land.
This being the nature of the country the farmer can but hedge his land
and fields with stone: he is in a measure compelled to do so, since the
earth is full of it and the land strewn with boulders; to make a field
he must remove it and bestow it somewhere. Now after centuries of this
process of removing and piling up stones, the farm land has become
covered over with a network of these enduring hedges, or fences,
intersecting each other at all angles; and viewed from a hill-top the
country has the appearance of a patched quilt made of pieces of all
sizes and every possible shape, and of all shades of green from darkest
gorse to the delicate and vivid greens of the young winter grass.
That half-reclaimed district, especially the strip of coast from St.
Ives Bay to Cape Cornwall, was a good winter hunting ground, and I spent
many weeks in ranging about the fields and waste or incult places among
them. Here you can wander at will, without fear of hurting the farmer's
feelings, as in Devonshire, by walking on his land. The cultivation is
little, the fields being mostly grass: the small farm-house is out of
sight somewhere behind the stone hedges; it is rare to meet with a human
being, and the few cows or calves you occasionally come across follow
you about as if only too pleased to have a visitor. Climbing over the
next hedge into the next field you find nobody there but a pig who
stares at you, then welcomes you with a good-humoured grunt; or an old
solitary plough-horse; or no semi-human domestic creature at all, only
a crowd of busy starlings; or starlings mixed with daws, field-fares,
missel-thrushes and a few wagtails; or a couple of magpies, or a small
flock of wintering curlews to be found day after day on the same spot.
After crossing two or three such fields you come upon an unreclaimed
patch, or belt, where grey-lichened rocks are mixed with masses of old
furze bushes, and heath and tussocks of pale brome-grass. A lonely,
silent, peaceful place, where, albeit a habitation of man for untold
centuries, it is wild Nature still.
Here, with eyes and mind occupied with the bird, I did not at first pay
much attention to the hedges: I simply got over them, or, in thorny and
boggy places, walked on them, but eventually they began to exercise an
attraction, and I began to recognise that these, too, like the planted
hedges of other districts, were man's creation but in part, since Nature
had added much to make them what they are. Human hands first raised
them: the process is going on all the time; the labourer, the cow-boy,
the farmer himself, when there is nothing else to do, goes out and piles
up stones to stop a gap the cattle have made, to add to the height or
length of an old hedge, and so on, but the wall once made is taken over
by Nature as in the case of the planted hedge. She softens and darkens
the crude harsh surface, clothes it in grey and yellow lichens and
cushioned green moss, and decorates it with everything that will grow on
it, before the time comes for her to ruin and finally to obliterate. But
what time is needed here for demolition with such a material as granite
to work on, where there are no trees to insinuate their roots into the
crevices, slowly to expand the pliant fibres into huge woody wedges
to thrust the loose stones apart and finally to pull them down! We
can imagine how slow the destructive processes are when we look at
innumerable Cornish crosses scattered over the county, showing clearly
the lines cut on them in the early days of Christianity in this
district. Still more do we see it in the ancient sacred stones--the
cromlechs, coits, hurlers and holed stones, moor-stones or "merry
maidens," and many others--which have stood and resisted the
disintegrating effect of the weather since prehistoric times. The wall
built is practically everlasting, but Nature works slowly on it, and the
hedges I had about me differed greatly on this account, from the rude
walls raised but yesterday or a dozen or twenty years ago to those which
must have stood for centuries or for a thousand years or longer. Indeed,
it was the appearance of extreme antiquity in one of these hedges, which
I often crossed and sometimes walked on, which first excited my interest
in the subject. It looked, and probably is, older than the walls of
Silchester, which date back 1700 or 1800 years, and are now being
gradually pulled down by the trees that have grown upon them. It was the
longest of the old hedges I found, beginning among the masses of
granite on the edge of the cliff, and winding away inland to lose itself
eventually among the rocks and gullies and furze-thickets at the foot
of a great boulder-strewn hill. Its sinuosity struck me as a mark of
extreme age, as in this it resembled the huge prehistoric walls or
earthworks made of chalk on the downs in Southern England, which meander
in an extraordinary way. It was also larger than the other hedges, which
crossed its winding course at all angles, being in most parts six to
seven feet high, and exceedingly broad; moreover, where the stones could
be seen they appeared to be more closely fitted together than in other
hedges. Most of the stonework was, however, pretty well covered over,
in some places with a very thick turf, in others by furze and bracken,
rooted in the crevices and in places hiding the wall in a dense thicket.
But of all the plants growing on it the ivy was most remarkable. It is
not a plant that flourishes in this district, where it has as hard a
struggle as any tree to maintain its existence. It is found only in
sheltered situations on this coast, in the villages, and on the landward
side of steep banks and large masses of rock. On this old wall there
was really no shelter, since the furious blasts from the sea swept
both sides of it with the same violence. Yet in places the ivy had got
possession of it, but it was an ivy very much altered in character by
the unfavourable conditions from that greenest luxuriant plant we know
so well. In place of the dark mass of foliage, the leaves were few and
small and far apart, so that viewing the wall from a little distance
away you would not notice that it had any ivy growing on it, but would
see that the more naked portions were covered with a growth of rope-like
stems.
[Illustration: 0065]
The wonder is that with so few leaves it can grow so much wood! The
stems, which are not thick, are smooth and of a pale grey colour and
grow in and out of the crevices, and cross and recross one another,
fitting into all the inequalities of the stony surface and in places
where they cover the wall looking like a numerous brood or tangle of
grey serpents.
This snaky appearance of the almost leafless old wall-ivy fascinated me,
and I went often to look at it on the same spot and was never tired of
the sight.
It struck me as curious that the woody ivy should have this aspect,
since the wall itself in some parts distinctly suggested the serpentine
form and appearance. Here again I was reminded of some of the long
earthworks or walls on the Wiltshire and Dorsetshire downs--the rounded,
thickly turfed bank which winds serpent-like over the hills and across
the valleys, and which often has a green colour differing slightly from
that of the earth it lies across.
The old Cornish hedge had this aspect in places where it was clothed
with turf, and, viewed from a distance and seen winding about in
great curves across the rough brown heath and furze-grown earth, the
serpentine appearance was very marked.
Whether or not the Cornish antiquaries have paid any attention to these
ancient hedges I do not know. The only native I came across who had
anything to say about them was a peasant farmer whose acquaintance
I made at his cottage-like farm, a few miles from the hedge I have
described. He was a man of seventy-nine but vigorous still and of a
lively mind. When I spoke to him about the old hedge and its ancient
appearance, he said he had known it all his life; that he was a native
of a small hamlet close to the hedge, and at the age of seven, when he
first took to birds'-nesting, he used to hunt along it on every summer
day and came to know it as well as he knew the fence round his garden
and the walls of the cottage he lived in. It had not, he assured me,
changed in the least during the last seventy or seventy-two years: it
was to-day exactly what it was in his early boyhood, with thick turf and
furze and bracken and woody ivy covering it in the same way in the same
old places. This made him think it must be very, very old.
It seemed to me that his life, although a long one, was but a short
period to measure by in such a case, that if he could have consulted his
father and grandfather and his remoter ancestors back to the time when
the last Cornish king was cast out by William the Bastard, they would
all have given the same testimony and said that the hedge was very old
when they knew it.
[Illustration: 0068]