Country diary: There’s a hard, ancient pleasure to laying a hedge | Michael White

Cranbrook, Kent: I have a stretch of leggy hawthorn that needs attention, so I head out into the cold with my axe and billhook

Wire netting is everywhere in the Kent Weald – barbed boundaries to ancient pastures where sheep and cattle still idly graze. But what did farmers do for the hundreds of years before stock fencing was invented?

Hedges, so rooted in what we wistfully consider to be our natural landscape, are in fact human-made features, planted almost solely for the purpose of enclosure. Unmanaged hedges are not a permanent solution, though: young trees mature, trunks become bare, and animal‑sized holes appear, rendering them useless. To remedy this, the practice of hedge laying was developed; unlike bricklaying, it is an act of maintenance rather than creation.