Hedgerows play a crucial role in the countryside, acting as wildlife corridors, sheltering crops and livestock and supporting biodiversity. These historic living landscape features require active and informed management to maximise their value for wildlife and the wider landscape.
Hedge numbers have declined rapidly in the last century. The Woodland Trust estimate that around 118,000 miles of hedgerows have disappeared across the UK since 1950. Already during the two world wars, some had been removed by compulsory order to provide land for the population to ‘dig for victory’. With reduced manpower following the wars, hedge restoration – a very expensive task – was not prioritised unless they were needed to manage stock. In more recent years, miles and miles of hedgerows have fallen victim to Dutch elm disease.
Hedgerows, with their deep root structure, act as a windbreak and as a barrier at the margins of farmers’ fields helping prevent soil from being eroded or blown away during dry months or high winds.
So, a major 10-year hedgerow restoration programme at the National Trust’s Wimpole Estate is heartening news. It will help reshape the historic working landscape, covering more than 1,000 hectares (2,471 acres), in the heart of Cambridgeshire.
The Wimpole Estate plan
Developed in 2023, the long-term programme sets out a plan to “restore and strengthen around 23 kilometres of hedgerow across the estate using a mix of traditional hedge management techniques and new planting . Over the course of the project, around 10 per cent of existing hedges will be coppiced, 6.7 kilometres will be laid, and 13.8 kilometres of new hedgerow will be planted, equating to approximately 83,000 native trees and shrubs across the estate”.
Already, over the winter, three National Trust property rangers and a team of volunteers supported by specialist contractors have planted over 30,000 trees, laid 1.6 kilometres of hedgerow, and coppiced a further 700 metres.
“At Wimpole, many hedgerows have developed uneven structure over time, with gaps and leggy growth that limit how well they function as part of the wider landscape,” says Dave Hassall, Farm & Countryside Manager at Wimpole Estate. “We are using well-established, traditional techniques to restore our network of hedgerows across the estate. Laying and coppicing hedgerows can seem quite extreme, but the hedges quickly grow back bigger and better than before.”
Creating a hedge is a skill and an art
As spring advances with flowers and leaf buds starting to shoot, now is the best time to examine the health of the hedgerows in your neighbourhood. Is the hedgerow being maintained or massacred? Is it constantly over-trimmed and overly manicured? Are there dying plants and gaps from excessive and brutal cutting?
Hedges go through a life cycle. Nigel Adams, award-winning chair of the National Hedgelaying Society, defined a 10 point scale to assist with identifying this. Hedgerows will respond well to sensible and rotational pruning. A good hedge manager recognises this and knows to intervene only when appropriate.
Repeated cutting of a hedgerow to the same level results in the remaining stems becoming larger and often gnarled and twisted. This indicates that the hedge is being stressed and will slowly weaken and die. Suffolk farmer Graham Denny advocates cutting on alternate sides of a hedgerow and top, once every three years. “This maintains the essential berry harvest and habitat for overwintering insects that are essential for many birds and mammals – wrens, long-tail tits, goldcrest, shrews, etc.”
The benefits of a healthy hedgerow
The National Trust states that their work across Wimpole Estate is helping hedgerows flourish. They are encouraging flowering, fruiting and dense healthy growth. This provides food and habitat for small mammals and red-listed farmland birds such as Corn Bunting, Yellowhammer and Linnet. It also provides winter food for visiting species including Fieldfares and Redwings.
Stronger hedgerows support the working farm on the estate by improving natural pest control in arable fields, creating firebreaks, protecting soils from erosion and reducing wind damage. “Each section of hedge that we restore makes the whole network bigger and better”, says Wimpole’s Farm and Countryside Manager Dave Hassall, explaining that “the landscape functions as a connected system,” and that their hedgerow restoration work helps to make the estate more resilient to the changing climate.
Wimpole Estate’s hedgerow restoration programme is a practical example of long-term countryside management in action. “Most farmers take a lot of pride in their hedges,” says Denny.
Yet there remain many farmers and landowners who are wasting their money employing untrained workers to cut, weaken and ultimately kill their hedges. Hopefully the work of the National Trust will continue to raise awareness of the importance of knowing how to maintain, and not massacre, the nations’ hedgerows for the benefit of man and beast.
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