My favourite childhood book
I enjoyed reading the recent posts by An Urban Veg Patch about a book she had picked up from her library called A Roses’s Garden and Anna at Green Tapestry with her Winter Aconite Flower Fairy post. They both made me think about my favourite childhood books from the Brambly Hedge series.
The books by Jill Barklem were about a colony of mice who lived in the trunks of hollowed out trees. Jill trained at St. Martin’s School of Art and it was on her long train journeys to college that she came up with her imaginary world. Using inspiration from walks in her local Epping Forest she filled sketch books with drawings of mice, trees and plants from the hedgerows and created the world of Brambly Hedge.
It was her illustrations that I loved the most. I was and still am mesmerised by her drawings of hollowed out trees with names like Crab Apple Cottage that had staircases winding up inside them leading to a myriad of rooms, with roaring fires, four poster beds and kitchens laden with food gathered from the hedgerows. I was fascinated by the idea of twinkling lights appearing from windows in the tree trunks, as night fell and mice with names such as Poppy Eyebright and Wilfred Toadflax scurrying back to their cosy homes. Jill Barklem’s Brambly Hedge books imbued me with a love of the countryside which has never left me.
Ironically, as Jill was writing her books the quintessential British hedgerow was continuing it’s decline. Between 1986 and 1996 the Independent estimated that Britain lost more than 110,000 miles of hedgerows, grubbed up to make fields easier to farm with large machinery. Hedgerows, it is believed, had been a feature of our landscape even before the Romans conquered and up until the Second World War they were a vital tool for farmers to manage their land, defining boundaries, dividing up land and providing shelter for livestock. The oldest known surviving hedge in England is ‘Judith’s Hedge’ in Cambridgeshire which is over 900 years old. After the Second World War there was pressure on farmers to produce more food and cheaply. Changes in agriculture meant smaller fields divided by hedges were not the most efficient way of farming and so vast tracts of hedges were destroyed, some may well have been there for hundreds of years. Norfolk, for instance has lost half of it’s hedgerows since the Second World War.
It wasn’t until 1997 that the Hedgerow Regulation Act required landowners to submit a hedgerow removal notice to their local planning department which gave councils the chance to protect ‘important’ hedges by issuing a retention notice. It seems crazy that it was only 15 years ago that hedgerows were given some protection when they are recognised as incredibly important for biodiversity. According to CPRE more than 80% of farmland birds rely on hedges for protection and food and many threatened mammals feed on their fruit and seeds. Geoffrey Lean writing in the Independent says they are home to over 250 species of plants and nearly half of lowland butterflies breed on them. Hedgerows even lock up carbon, a 2km stretch of hedge can absorb between 1200 and 1600 kg of CO2. An average car travelling 6000 miles would emit this amount of CO2. (Norfolk Wildlife Trust)
Hedgerows criss-crossing the countryside
All is not lost though. Some counties such as Devon, Cornwall, Herefordshire and my own Monmouthshire have held onto their hedgerows. The topography suiting small fields and a predominance of livestock farming rather than arable meant there was no need to grub out hedges. Devon, in fact has more hedgerows than any other county with 33,000 miles and one quarter of these are over 800 years old. (Devon County Council website) I love holidays in Devon and Cornwall at any time of the year but in Spring a real treat is the sight of the deep and tall earthbank hedgerows alive with wildflowers. Driving down tiny lanes with tall hedgerows and trees creating a tunnels of dappled light with drifts of bluebells, wild garlic, red campion, cowparsley and foxgloves lining the lanes. A beautiful and integral part of our landscape that should be more appreciated and protected.
For more information there are some great websites out there. CPRE produces a small guide to hedgerows with a handy pull-out identification chart. Devon County Council’s website has an excellent section on hedgerows. I’ve included links for both in the post above. If you would like to survey local hedgerows contact your local Wildlife Trust.
I’ve never read any books from the Brambly Hedge series, it sounds like I’ve been missing out as they’re just the type of stories I would have loved as a child. It’s another ‘in hindsight’ situation with the hedgerows. It’s too late to do anything about all the miles and miles of hedgerow which we’ve lost now, let’s hope that we can manage to keep what’s left, as you say, it’s so important for biodiversity.
EU farm policy did a lot of damage to Ireland’s hedgerows. Farmers were encouraged to make bigger fields by taking out hedgerows. Really stupid policy as wildlife and plant diversity suffered and of course the animals have no shelter. Guess what…now they’re paying them to put back hedgerows!
At the risk of sounding like an ignorant American, what exactly is a hedgerow?
Norfolk Wildlife Trust defines a hedgerow as any line of trees or shrubs over 1 metre tall and over 20 metres long, less than 5 metres wide at the base with less than 30% of the hedgerow being gaps. Hedgerows are generally made up of native plants such as holly, hawthorn, brambles and blackthorn amongst others and used by farmers and landowners to separate fields, define boundaries and keep in livestock. It’s what gives the British and Irish countryside the patchwork quilt look. Hope that helps!!
That’s VERY helpful. I’ve seen pictures of the countryside, and understood the “lines” were hedgerows; I just had no idea they were native, diverse and very populated. I’m enjoying your blog a lot, and my vocabulary is expanding. A month ago I didn’t know what allotments and hedgerows were.
Your Bramley Hedge books sound just the sort of books I would have enjoyed as a child, must see if I can still find any so that I can enter my 2nd childhood!
Living in Devon I realise we are very lucky to have all our hedges, usually growing on top of a Devon bank. The flowers that grow on the banks are absolutely delightful and driving along in the spring and early summer is so distracting when trying to identify all the plants.
There was something in the Guardian recently about the inportance of hedges and one of the things it highlighted was the way some birds and mammals use the hedge as a kind of road to travel on in relative safety. Also, bees apparently prefer to fly parallel to a hedge as a way of getting from one food area to another. Fascinating.
How beautifully you’ve woven the nostalgia for brambly hedge with the harsh facts of hedgerows. Land grabbers just get bigger whilst small farmers disappear along with their boundaries. Interestingly not just a countryside problem – recent consulation of a public garden renovation was going to grub out boundary hedges and plant fruit trees and wildlflowers. Tick box mentality which forgot how much birds depend on the scrubby perimeter hedges . The garden designer was good enough to admit that she’d not considered birds needs until I raised the issue. Her focus was on insects…but they need hedges and wildflowers!
I will be adding the Brambly Hedgerow books to my reading list. They sound absolutely delightful. As does the countryside of your beloved homeland. How I wish to see the hedge in full bloom.
We have a lot of native hedge and have planted a lot more. All the new planting is both native and edible. I love it. It hasn’t been in very long though so it will be a while before it attains the dignity and presence of an old hedge. Did you see the Sarah Raven programme tonight? The footage of blowing up old hedge roots with gelignite was both astonishing and sickening. What have we done to our landscape? I am just closing my ears and eyes so as not to go nuts and tilling my own patch. We have a lot of bees so I must be doing something right!
There’s quite a mix of open fields, dykes, fences and hedging in this part of the country. For quite a while there were subsidies for fences so that became the chosen perimeter. More recently farmers with land by the sea have planted mixed hedges so stop the sand blowing over their fields. On of my favourite are dykes but it’s expensive to get old stone. Building and repairing dykes need real expertise and patience if done without mortar.
A most enjoyable, informative and thoughtful post! xx
Now the ‘Brambly Edge’ books came out long after my childhood but WW but I do have a full set of them. Have to something for visiting little people to read ~ well that’s my excuse
They are exquisitely illustrated and what an excellent imagination Jill Barklem has. On a more serious note the destruction of our age old hedgerows is so sad and impossible I would think to reverse. Let’s hope that the ones that are left are allowed to continue to flourish and provide sanctuary for flora and fauna.
You know Brambly Hedge is one of my favourites! and thank you for the link, Welly, most kind. I’ve thoroughly enjoyed reading this post; it’s both thoughtful and thought provoking with the conversation extended through the comments left above. I hate to see the countryside destroyed. I spent my childhood years in Cornwall, Devon, Yorkshire and Dorset – all places where I spent many happy hours close to nature. I hope that with more communities coming together as ‘transition towns’ to share skills and knowledge, the old skills of drystone walling, hedging, thatching, etc won’t be lost. I’m very aware of the need to preserve shrubs and hedges. I have one very overgrown border with multiple shrubs growing into each other. It’s a bit of a mess but my goodness you should hear the bees and birds in the summer! I will fight anyone that tries to chop it back!
What a lovely blog! I love Brambley Hedge and, like you, I have always been enchanted by the beautiful tales and detailed drawings. Looking back I suppose it was the celebration of the Seasons that made it magical for me. Thank you for reminding me of Poppy and Wilfred… and the delightful Dusty Dogwood deserves a mention
I adore Bramley Hedge, like you, the illustrations still captivate me and it’s where my love of the countryside and wildlife began. I grew up in London, on a harsh council estate, a far cry from the world of Bramley Hedge and other books such as Beatrix Potter. I used books such as these to escape, I loved getting lost in their little world x
When I was a child, the Brambly Hedge books (and Beatrix Potter) gave me my earliest images of England and English life, so different from the Australia I lived in. I wanted to visit Crab Apple Cottage and sit by the fire while the snow lay outside. Ever since then hedgerows have always semed romantic to me – a world apart, where a busy and complex life goes on in secret, away from the modern world. There are no hedgerows in Australia; our farms have always been large areas of cleared land, completely visible from the roads, although some farmers are planting ‘wildlife corridors’ now. When I finally visited England for the first time last year, one of the joys was seeing the hedgerows of Devon and Cornwall in June.
What a wonderful post (and blog). I was smitten by Brambly Hedge when it first came out, but had forgotten about it.
-And your wonderful hedgerows! Thank you for such an informative and delightful post, I miss your England and its “land of counterpane” landscape.
-Susan