Iconic stone hedge banks are a necessity

April is always a blur on the farm with so much to be dealt with - so much new life everywhere with lambing outside in full swing and calving well underway. The challenge is always finding feed for them as once they have given birth their only mission is to eat like crazy to feed themselves up after a long pregnancy and produce lots of milk to help their babies thrive. Once again, weather is key - lots of spring sunshine with just enough rain to keep the grass growing. At this time of year, the farm is full of sheep and there are always some escapologists! Some of which I am sure you have met crawling through our Devon banks to get to the succulent buds on the hedges and young trees, or the abundant grass in your garden maybe?

For this reason, most livestock farmers in this part of the world have to have good boundary defences in the form of our iconic stone-faced Devon hedge banks. We tend to fence our hedges to keep the animals where we put them, and this winter we have been replacing some of our fences, maintaining the banks, coppicing the woody growth on top and giving them a general tidy up. We were lucky with the weather after Christmas and got quite a lot done, but a wet mushy February stopped us in our tracks. But mud or no mud I am going to have them completed and job done by lambing, or as I have explained, I will have sheep roaming everywhere they shouldn’t be! So hopefully by the time you read this I will have completed several hundred meters of fencing and bank maintenance, and you won’t meet my sheep in your garden.

Often hedge banks are taken for granted, but they are pretty unique to this part of the world with thousands of miles of them making up the patchwork of small sheltered fields, creating some spectacular landscapes. Although I have heard visitors driving in the area say they wish farmers would take the banks down as they can’t see the view! Hedges also offer, if managed well, fantastic wildlife corridors and habitat to all manner of beasts and creepy crawlies. It is not until you actually get up close to one and have to repair it that you realise the effort that must have been involved in creating these large functional boundaries. There must have been an army of workers on the land using the stone and soil at hand to sculpt them. Very often you will find an antique bottle in the middle of a bank, probably discarded by a thirsty farm-hand working to create it. My late dad used to say that you can tell how many stones are in the field by looking at the hedge banks. Obvious really, but these armies of workers used whatever materials were to hand to build these boundaries. So smaller fields with lots of stone in the banks generally means there is lots of stone in the land around them. Bigger fields with more soil in the banks suggest much richer and deeper soil. The old boys weren’t fools, they didn’t carry stones far and they would build the banks around the biggest stones in the landscape. Which explains why some fields in the stonier parts of Dartmoor have very wobbly hedge banks. A local field is called Fiddle Field for this precise reason, with some car-sized granite boulders in its hedges.

I still love the satisfaction of repairing a gap in a hedge bank by hand, but nowadays it is mostly done by machine as time is too precious. My grandfather would say that ‘every stone has a face’ and when you picked up a stone you weren’t to put it down again until you found its place in the wall. I suppose every region has its own type of boundary, favouring its stone, soil and the type of farming suited to that land. And as long as sheep and cattle are still welcome in this landscape, these iconic structures will still have a very useful function.

By Mat Cole, Greenwell Farm