Perhaps somewhat bleak, I spotted this ancient hedgerow whilst passing in the car when returning home from a February visit to the Royal Horticultural Society’s garden at Rosemoor in North Devon, just outside of Great Torrington.
The afternoon was a typically cool slightly misty and overcast February day in Devon. We were returning home driving along the A386, which despite it’s Primary A-Road status is quite twisty and winding in places. As we passed an open gate in the leafless hedgerow alongside the road, I noticed this stark long-overgrown and abandoned hedgerow isolated in an adjacent field. We stopped the car, turned around and went back and parked just inside the gate to the field.
What has happened here is that originally these trees were part of a hedgerow on an earth bank forming a long vanished field boundary. The hedge would have been routinely trimmed every few years by hand, by a traditional practice known as hedgelaying, a process of partially cutting through and then bending the stems of a line of shrubs or small trees, near ground level, without breaking them, so as to encourage them to produce new growth from the base and create a living ‘stock proof fence’.
These days hedgelaying is still practiced in parts of rural Devon, usually in historically managed properties or within the Dartmoor National Park for example, where grants and subsidies are available to maintain such labour intensive traditional practices, but elsewhere most hedges are cut by flails or mechanical cutters mounted on tractors which is much quicker and more economical.
In this instance the hedge has not been laid for many years, and the layered branches of the various shrubs have sprouted and grown upwards into small trees, whilst the earth bank has been eroded by the weather, possibly aided by livestock. As a result the roots of the shrubs comprising the hedgerow have become exposed, giving the appearance of a line of trees marching across the landscape.
However, on it’s own the hedgerow would look a bit stark, but this image works (for me at least) because of the small chapel on the horizon in the background. At the time that the photograph was taken, the chapel was still a religious House of Worship, however now it is a private residence and a small pottery (Little Lane Pottery).
I quite like the black & white version of this photo, and the composition. The black & white emphasises the gloomy wintry day, overcast, grey and with a slight misty haze – depressingly flat, which seemed an appropriate mood for the line of elderly trees seeming to be walking across the landscape. The way that the trees almost stoop down to the right hand side rather emphasises their age, rather like a line of old people out walking and stooped over their walking sticks. Secondly I like the way that the trees are stooped over the chapel, which is in a particularly bleak location almost at the summit of Merton Moor, exposed to all the elements, with the line of bare telegraph poles reinforcing the bleakness. (And if one squints whilst looking, the ancient hedgerow almost looks like a long-legged alien space monster marching across the landscape about to devour the little chapel!)