My back’s hurting and someone suggests I take a break. I wander up the bridleway to the top of Elliot's Hill. A Robin is whistling in the ivy tod on the hedge-bank next to the gate, calling his mate home for Spring to their nest in a crevice between the stones. The cold wind whips at the ivy tod and the robin. In my mind’s eye I see Jack Connabeer, hedger and farmer whittling hedge-crooks for his winter’s hedging round a cosy fire in his barton where I to spoke to him last. His Grandfather, farmer at Aish, Poundsgate and the farm labourers, Tom and Bill, taught Jack hedging and dry-stone walling in the 30’s as soon as he was old enough to swing a hammer. Hedge-craft was handed through the generations then. I picture Jack’s gnarled hands, hear the patient swick of the billhook, watch the drift of hazel chippings landing by his feet. A good sharp billhook is also needed for hedging and a good pair of baffles: blackthorn spines are fierce! Jack was a master sharpener too; folk brought their billhooks from all over. It was an art. Bronze age had sophisticated technology – ice sharp bronze blades, the billhook has hardly evolved since their invention 4 thousand years ago by the Bronze Age folk.

On the edge of the Down, a venerable hedge-bank (the oldest at Pudsham Meadows) bounds the bridleway and one of the finest hay meadows in the National Park. Atleast four feet in height, three or four foot in width, it is a substantial stone-faced earth bank interpolated with leaves of tutsan, foxglove, various ferns and bilberry, studded with lichen cups, lush with ferns and mosses. Pillaring above the veteran standards, oak and rowan, and holly, once planted for firewood, spaced at intervals, porous now with the wind. And along the bank blackthorn scrub. ‘On Dartmoor a hedge is a stone-faced built bank topped with a variety of shrubs, but blackthorn is mainly used. ‘Our hedges here are often double combed with two rows of thorn’, Jack taught me. ‘For steeping maple is hard, spindle tricky, best is oak or ash but the very best is blackthorn’.

‘Regular maintenance is attained by steeping in the winter months, when the sap is low, to keep a dense barrier along the top. You cut two-thirds of the way into the tree stems perpendicular to the ground and steep ‘em, – lay down the stems. Then you crook 'em to hold the hedge up.’  

'Old overgrown hedges were part of the romance of the English landscape’, writes Rackham; they were also sources of thorn. ‘In Medieval times blackthorn was highly valued (as were thorn spinneys) as a source for ‘trouse’: temporary thorn barriers to protect quicksets, the early growth or 'spring' of a newly planted hedge.’

The robin is singing perched on a thorn tip. It’s a hedge-bank and seems like a living painting. Bonneted with wildflowers in the Spring, it’s the crown of Dartmoor’s beauty. In Summer starred with corollas of blue sheep's bit and pollinated by sheep’s bit hover-fly. I imagine the solitary bees that will soon nest here in the silty loam between the stones. I consider the skill of the men or women hedgers that was handed down through the hundred generations and how enduring the hedge is– perhaps eight hundred years old. Meadows, and their associated traditions of haymaking, shepherding and hedging, are part of our cultural heritage and should be treated as we treat our ancient buildings. But in ages past as today the hedge is above all for practical use,  a shelter belt, a flood mitigator, food for stock as well as bees.

Well, time to get back to the job in hand: eradication of the three-cornered leek. On my way past Sylvia’s Field I look in to where the team—mainly women—are cutting molinia and foiling the blackthorn’s attempt to form thickets and transform the meadow into a wood. Swinging strimmers, wielding what look like those long handled dustpan and brush sets, but made of steel and weighing a tonne, they pull out tens of unashamed escapee thorn-whips sprung from runners barely hidden beneath the soil. Physically demanding graft.

Blackthorn thickets and spinneys were a valuable source for wood for building dead-hedge: not a hedge that is dead but a hedge of cut thorn. A quick answer to necessity: an instant hedge, hurdle for ewes and their lambs at lambing time, barrier to wolf and bear; effective, if not long lived. The earliest records of hedging date from 547 AD, no earlier evidence remains other than the discovery of Early Bronze-age billhooks and elm wood mallets or beadles. 

That is until the discovery of a sprig of blackthorn. An archaeological excavation in Cambridgeshire revealed the sprig which is believed to be the remnant of a hedge dating from around 2000 BC!  

Raining again, mud on my hands and legs I’m tussling with the leek roots, throwing them in a bucket. They must be taken off-site and dumped in licensed waste facilities so pernicious they are. The weight of the pick in my hand, the thud on my wrist; I see in my mind’s eye folk wielding hooks in the rain of an ancient age long ago.  

I turn, my hat dumps water on my legs. In the corner of my eye the farmers are making a dead-hedge. They feel the jolting of the billhook all the way up their arms as they cut blackthorn branches from a thicket. Unbending, drawing their cloaks around them as the cold creeps, then down they go again putting force and urgency into the blows as evening falls. I smell the sap from the riven stems of blackthorn, hear the thrash of a billhook, the blow of a mallet  as they drive in the line of stakes, heave up the larger branches, lay and criss-cross them between the poles, fill the gaps with brash and erect a ferocious blackthorn dead-hedge.

On Dartmoor the season is shifting. Foxes emerge from earths. Redwings prepare for their long journey north. From the south, the blackcap arrived in my home wood four days ago. It’s almost a year since I first wrote under the willow tree in Sylvia’s Field. Unable to attend last week’s management day, I’m popping over to see what’s changed at Pudsham. I was too early for the chiff-chaff but I did find the chaffinch singing on his old perch. There were pink willow buds and leaves of scabious pushing through determinedly, wet in the morning mist. I discovered a sprig of ling growing up where the mollinia had shaded it out, home to its own pug moth. When I was in Sylvia’s Field the rain fell, but softer than the rain of February. 

Blackthorn blossoms begins to push through in the sheltered edge of Pudsham meadow. A dunnock warbled. I noticed the steeped blackthorn that the management team had laid last week. But it was cold and I had to keep moving. On the moor side far off at Corndon one walled enclosure was lit by the sun, but I was not warmed by it. The wind strengthened, fed by the clouds. But it was not a south westerly wind, not a wind to bring home the chiffchaff. A skylark wasn’t deterred: the north wind brought him out. He pirouetted up and sang over Pudsham Meadows.

Dartmoor is a place that has changed over time; the inhabitants have come and gone. The plants shift too but the walls and hedges remain. Human stories are revealed. Stories bound to nature. Stories that are living in our environment and sense of place. Ghosts and clues are coming and going everyday. Stories are waiting to be told about the earlier Dartmoor folk if you are lucky enough to see them.

*Dense Molinia growth and overdominance of tussocks hinder growth of  other native plants such as Devils’-bit-scabious and Ragged robin both food sources for the endangered Marsh fritillary butterfly as well as other insects whose lives they underpin. Tough Molinia hummocks are unpalatable to the Dartmoor Ponies that are brought to graze here in the Autumn unless strimmed, sliced and thereby rendered more digestible. 

Jack Connabeer’s full story of farming in the 1930’s until 2002 and his setting up of Devon Rural Skills Trust with farmers Herbert Snowden and Dave Hannaford will soon be available in Roz Brady’s new book. See Roz Brady.com for latest news about all her books and events.

For hedge-laying courses please see Devon Rural Skills Trust’s website.