A rough shooter’s paradise

Think of the British countryside today and a number of images spring immediately to mind. A village green, a thatched cottage, perhaps even a parish church. But I’m prepared to wager that hedgerows will feature somewhere in those imaginings. Hedgerows, innocent and ever present, divide fields into the patchwork quilt landscape that is so much a part of our cultural heritage and is, to us, so familiar.

You might be surprised to learn, however, that this beloved feature of our rural landscape was once the cause of riot, bloodshed and death and that, far from being ancient, is in the vast majority of cases a relatively recent addition to our countryside.

Truly ancient hedgerows are rare in Britain and, hard as it may be to imagine, our countryside was once an unhindered open landscape. Prior to the beginning of a long series of Enclosures Acts, hedges subdividing arable or grazing land