Traditional hedge-laying skills
The Park family’s goal is to farm in a way that is good for the land, the livestock, the environment, and the wider community. The traditional skill of hedge-laying helps to maintain these important wildlife habitats, which also act as barriers for livestock and provide delicious fruits that are frozen and enjoyed throughout the year in the café specials.
Here, Alison retells her experience of helping to plant a new hedge on the farm trail and learning hedge-laying as part of a competition held here on the farm.
“Several part-days of planting a new hedge on our popular farm trail got me and my younger son Joe interested in the Friends of the Lake District annual hedge-laying competition held at Low Sizergh Farm on Saturday 11 March. The competition was part of the Lancashire & Westmorland Hedgelaying Association’s Grand Prix event series to find the best hedge-layers so the stakes were high.
“The selected hedge was dense and overgrown, particularly at the top end of the field where the professionals’ sections were marked off. Further down the slope were the less experienced and the beginners, taught by Peter Gibson, several times winner of the National Hedge Laying Championships and voted ‘Supreme’ hedge layer three times.
“The instruction was in the Lancashire & Westmorland style of hedging, one that is designed to be stock proof against both cattle and sheep. Hawthorn and blackthorn are plentiful in our local hedges because the thorn is no friendlier to animals than to humans, hence the tough leather gauntlets the hedgers wear.
“After clearing the base of the hedge from excessive or diseased wood and lopping off the lower side branches, we stood back to assess the best vertical stems to withstand the axe and bend uphill to 45 degrees.
“Peter the trainer encouraged us learner axe-wielders to chop with purpose ‘get angry with it, get mad, go on, get madder’. The stem appeared to be hanging by its bark before he put a stop to the slicing: ‘Whoa! Now walk it. Walk the axe’. Wedged in, the cleft the axe must be moved gently at the base of the stem in order to bend it without snapping it. But ‘walking’? Would that be back and forth, side to side, or up and down?
“The axe head must encourage the stem to lay down facing uphill, the direction sap rises.
“From the new axe-exposed wood shoots will grow. Because the Westmorland hedge is double-sided, guided by stakes on alternate sides, the inner fills out to create that all–important stock-proof barrier and shelter.
“Just as essential are the life-sustaining functions of our landscape’s hedges. They teem with wildlife, maintain and connect up habitats that halt biodiversity decline, reduce flood risk and capture carbon.
“My brother Richard has been working his way around the many miles of Low Sizergh’s hedges every 10 -12 years. The older generation has been heard to say ‘this is the last time I’ll lay this one’. The next generation must learn this skill amongst the many that are required to farm in our precious landscape.
“Fortunately, the raised eyebrows that would until recent years have accompanied a young woman turning out to work on a farm’s hedges are now in the past. There were plenty of women learning and competing, using the traditional axe and billhook or revving up a chainsaw as they saw fit.
“Chairman of the National Hedgelaying Society, Joe Craig greeted my dad, John, warmly. They competed in the 1950s and 60s and reminisced about the chainsaw-free quiet of those past events: ‘Well, we think we’d prefer it without the chainsaws but you go and ask your wife’ Joe mused. ‘Would she like to use a dolly tub and a mangle when there’s a washing machine available?’
“‘I could ask her’ mused my dad. ‘But then I’d have to duck.’”
If you are visiting Low Sizergh, you are welcome to walk the farm’s free farm trail. At just under two miles long, it winds down to a pond and through fields and ancient woodland. You might just spot some recent hedging work and you’ll certainly see the newly-planted hedge in the field adjacent to the camp site.