The humble hedgerow is often overlooked when we’re out walking, but at this time of year they are rich pickings for wildlife and their value to our landscape and heritage is equally important. Here Norfolk Wildlife Trust volunteer, David North celebrates Norfolk’s hedges.

Imagine just for one moment that we could fashion pathways for wildlife that would form a network across not just the whole of Norfolk, but all of England. A network that was far greater in length than our human road system. A complex geographical system of routes designed so well that many very different wildlife species could move along these corridors at different levels, and with food and shelter provided at regular intervals. A system enabling bats to flit between woods following this network at height, long-tailed tits and parties of small finches to flutter safely through cover metres off the ground, hedgehogs to snuffle through nice dry leaves at ground level, rabbits to bound through the shelter of briar and thicket, while butterflies, bees, and a thousand other insects find both food and shelter on their fluttery, buzzy, but surprisingly lengthy, journeys. Let’s be ambitious and say we want a system ten times the length of the human road system and then add to the design brief that it must enable a huge range of species as different as tiny insects, mice, shrews, voles, birds of many kinds, rabbits, foxes, badgers and even large herbivores, like deer, all to find food and shelter as they travel. Shall we make this network? 'Great idea' I can hear you thinking, but what about the cost? Who is going to provide the land? Surely one system can’t meet so many different and widely ranging needs? An impossible dream of course.  Well here’s one that I… ok, let’s be honest - a thousand years of human history prepared earlier. Welcome to hedge-land. 

Like most of us I’m not always very good at seeing the things I walk past everyday and that’s certainly true of hedges. Where I live in rural north Norfolk, they are so much part of the landscape that they have become, well, just ‘part of the landscape’ and that means it’s far too easy to forget just how remarkable they are. I guess to really appreciate the pattern of hedges in the Norfolk landscape you need a bird’s-eye-view, but anyone who’s returned by air from a holiday abroad on a daytime flight and looked out of a plane window in southern England will realise just what a rich contribution they make to the English landscape. 

Hawthorn berries, by David North

Sadly I can’t fly, but I can walk, and so on an early November weekend I headed off on a Norfolk hedge ramble accompanied by a very enthusiastic border collie. Looking more carefully than usual at my local hedges was an eye-opener. No two hedges are quite the same. I passed low gappy hedges, some more gap than hedge, tall overgrown, rambly hedges with wide brambly margins, hedges sitting high on ferny banks, and others now so overgrown that they are more tree lines than hedge lines. I walked along both lane-side and field-side hedges and although hawthorn was by far the commonest shrub, within one kilometre from home, I had soon spotted seven other shrub species - blackthorn and elm were in abundance. Our hedgerows are the last great refuge of elm in Norfolk which has largely vanished as a stately mature tree following the depredations of Dutch elm disease. Other hedgerows had short sections of holly, elder, hazel, sycamore and field maple. Oak was present, and less commonly ash, but mainly in the form of magnificent fully grown trees towering through and over the hedgerows. Some sections of hedge were dominated by ivy, sometimes still with globes of yellow flowers rich in pollen proving a magnet for autumn wasps, hoverflies and many other small insects. Redwings, mistle thrushes, blackbirds, and occasional fieldfares flew ahead of me, seeming to prefer the taller, more diverse hedges, doubtless attracted by a profusion of sweet, glistening purple blackberries and rich red hips and haws. There were tangled chains of bryony berries dangling on twisted strings and ripening red berries of honeysuckle. And in just one hedge, the shiniest red berries of all, those of guelder rose, hanging in sticky fermenting bunches. Few hazel nuts remained – had they all already been taken by squirrels I wonder? Under the larger hedge oaks, my feet crunched on warm brown acorns while overhead jays gave their raucous calls with two flying ahead of me, pink-breasted, white-rumped and each carrying an acorn in its beak.   

The one word that springs to mind to describe my short hedgerow ramble was profusion – a profusion of food in the form of seeds and berries. A profusion of life in the form of a myriad insects; the soft autumn songs of robins; the high pitched calls of long-tailed tits and the many thrushes and blackbirds - perhaps recent arrivals from abroad that every so often would dive out of the hedge in front of me, flying down the hedge with strident, reproving notes of alarm. 

Our landscape, and our wildlife, would be poorer without this extraordinary network of farmland, roadside and garden hedges. The facts and figures are pretty remarkable and speak for themselves. Despite huge losses during decades of post-war agricultural ‘improvement’ we still today have more than 500,000 kms of farmland hedges in England with more than 15,000 kms in Norfolk. We should of course have a lot more. It’s estimated that in England between 1946 and 1970 on average 7,245 kms of hedgerow were grubbed up every year. This was especially bad in the East of England with Norfolk losing 805km each year between 1946 and 1955 rising to an average of over 3,000 km lost each year during the 1960s. 

Let’s at least treasure and value those hedges we have left. While many straight field boundary hedges are dominated by a single species, usually hawthorn or ‘quick thorn’ as it was once known and may date from the enclosures of the 18th and 19th centuries. Other hedges, more species-rich and more sinuous in their geography, perhaps on a bank following a Parish boundary, or with a deep ditch alongside, may be many centuries or even millennia old. Our Norfolk hedgerows are both part of our own human history and part of our natural history: part culture, part wild.  Animal and plant names such as hedgehog, hedge sparrow, hedge hawk (an old name for the sparrowhawk), hedge woundwort and hedge bedstraw show the links between wildlife and hedges were recognised deep in our past.   

Today when so much of the agricultural landscape has become less favourable to wildlife; our hedges form vital pathways across Norfolk’s beet and barley fields. They are highways for bats, and low-ways for hedgehog, stoat, weasel, rabbit, shrew, vole and mouse. They are winter shelter for partridge and pheasant. They are a myriad spring flowers providing early nectar sources and a places to sun for emerging queen bees. They are summer nesting site for whitethroat, yellowhammer, partridge and pheasant and song post for a thousand robins, finches and thrushes.  They are the autumn haunt of red admiral, comma and tortoiseshell; nut and acorn feasts for squirrel, jay and mouse; and, for those humans who still venture out blackberrying, a source of purple-stained hands, thorn scratches, nettle stings and deep joy.

Song thrush in an ivy bush, by Pat Adams



Our hedges are hope for the future. Do we have the vision to look after and enhance this network for nature, filling in gaps by judicious planting and creating new hedges to add vital links where these are missing? The vision to encourage our farmers to create wide hedge margins and ensure these are  wildflower-rich by preventing spray drift, using the hedge flail sparingly and letting berries and seeds ripen for hungry migrant birds, rather than cutting too early in autumn. We can manage our hedges to give new trees a chance to grow tall from their shelter and ensure the tens of millions of hedgerow trees that give character to so much of our landscape today have descendents: veteran trees for future generations to sit under and marvel at. Trees also for future generations of woodpeckers to drum on, for hidden tawny owls to hoot from, and rough-barked trunks for badgers to scratch against and squirrels to chase each other up. 

If we cherish and value our hedge network enough ,then, just perhaps, there is hope that as our climate changes wildlife will make use of these quiet hedge highways to move along, enabling wildlife populations to shift, respond and adapt to the new and changed climate conditions that are coming.
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