Country cheer - hedgerows make a comeback

Country cheer - hedgerows make a comeback

Martin Wainwright


Photograph: Peter Dean/Alamy

Landscape damage inflicted by decades of farmers digging up hedgerows is finally being reversed, according to a national survey.
Published only weeks after one of the best hawthorn blossom and cow parsley seasons for years, the study shows that government measures - passed after persistent pressure from wildlife campaigners - have started to revive traditional borders to roads and fields.

Wholesale removal of hedges, which characterised intensive farming during the 1950s and 1960s in particular, has "all but ceased", according to the survey from the Countryside Agency, the quango charged with encouraging rural prosperity. Even on the wide flatlands of East Anglia, where the worst damage was done, problems with wind erosion of the rich soil, unprotected by hedges, has helped change farmers' minds.

The return of dying practices such as hedge-laying and the careful cultivation of mixed species of hedge plants is also charted in the findings - the fourth part of an exercise started 33 years ago. Warnings in the 1960s that lowland areas were losing useful wildlife - especially predators of crop insect pests - as well as shelter, prompted the then Ministry of Agriculture to launch the project.
The full report is launched by the agency today as a book - Agricultural Landscapes: 33 Years of Change. The agency's chairman, Stuart Burgess, said: "It presents us with an invaluable visual record of the lowland landscape, a picture against which future changes in the countryside can be compared."

The findings focus on seven detailed study areas, including Cambridgeshire and Huntingdonshire, where hedge and tree removal, land drainage and a glut of new farm buildings were causing widespread concern in the early 1970s.