#217: Hedgelink

Hedgelink is a useful site to go to for anyone teaching about the value of hedgerows.

Hedgelink brings together organisations and individuals with a love of hedgerows. We share knowledge and ideas to encourage and inspire everyone to take action to manage, protect and conserve our hedgerows for the future.

They provide a range of resources on the value of hedgerows, which are not always guaranteed to remain where they have been for (potentially) centuries. There is plenty of information elsewhere on the importance of hedges in creating the enclosures of land and marking boundaries.

They have a Hedge Hub with all related resources. This CPRE guide is a useful one, for example, as it describes the techniques for investigating the origins and age of hedgerows by looking at the variety of plant species they contain. This might include an investigation into Hooper's Rule for ageing a hedge.

Wikipedia explains more

Hooper's rule (named for Dr. Max Hooper) is based on ecological data obtained from hedges of known age, and suggests that the age of a hedge can be roughly estimated by counting the number of woody species counted in a thirty-yard distance and multiplying by 110 years.

Max Hooper published his original formula in the book Hedges in 1974. This method is only a rule of thumb, and can be off by a couple of centuries; it should always be backed up by documentary evidence, if possible, and take into account other factors. Caveats include the fact that planted hedgerows, hedgerows with elm, and hedgerows in the north of England tend not to follow the rule as closely. The formula also does not work on hedges more than a thousand years old. 

The founding father of contemporary Local Studies W.G. Hoskins, also pointed out that the number and types of species vary from county to county, which casts further doubt on Hooper’s Rule as an accurate dating tool. So unless it can be verified with historic records, it cannot stand alone.

Hooper's scheme is important not least for its potential use in determining what an important hedgerow is, given their protection in The Hedgerows Regulations (1997; No. 1160) of the Department of the Environment, based on age and other factors.

Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hedge

Hedges are of particular significance in the landscape in Devon - see link here (PDF download)

#126: Natural History Reading List #10: W.G. Hoskins and 'The Making of the English Landscape'

In his pioneering work The Making of the English Landscape (1955), William George Hoskins (1908-1992) claimed ‘to those who know how to read it aright, the English landscape is the richest historical document we possess’. 

William Hoskins (1908-1992) was born in Exeter, Devon, the son of a baker. He won a scholarship to St Hele’s School and later studied at the University of Exeter. In 1931 he became a lecturer at the University of Leicester, where he founded the Department of English Local History in 1948, which went on to pioneer the study of people in their landscapes. In 1951 he was appointed as Reader in Economic History at Oxford University. He was made a fellow of the British Academy in 1969 and became a CBE in 1971. He wrote and edited many books including The Midland Peasant, Local History in England and Two Thousand Years in Exeter. In 1972 he made a television series for the BBC, based on his best-seller, The Making of the English Landscape. He was also president of the Dartmoor Preservation Association and was elected onto the City Council, to help preserve its historic fabric.

The book demonstrated the profound impact of human activity on the evolution of both rural and urban English Landscapes, introducing a brand-new source of primary information for scholars of various disciplines. 

Over the subsequent decades, Hoskins’ work has had profound impact on the work of historians, geographers, archaeologists, planners and conservationists, transforming their approaches to local, regional and national studies.

My version is the Little Toller Books version with cover photography by Fay Godwin.

From the page here, you can read a new introduction by William Boyd.

This is one of the books that will be in my GCSE Natural History library which is taking shape nicely.