Past and future presence
- Mar 25
- 6 min read
Words by Jamie Crocker
A year of hedgelaying reveals more than just craft and skill.
Hedgelaying begins with a billhook, a simple tool that cuts into the living material. The fibres part, the stem is bent and a living boundary is crafted into shape. It is akin to an act of reverence that carries with it many of the attributes of a medieval pilgrimage – an itinerant lifestyle, cold hands, damp cuffs and the faint smell of smoke from winter fires clinging to clothes. For Paul Lamb, though, author of Of Thorn and Briar, this is retention and argument made manifest rather than just pure homage. What he is perpetuating is a rural skill that is reasserting its relevance in a world that has, up until recently, advocated the grubbing up of our ancient natural heritage in the name of maximum yield.
When he answers the telephone, he is standing beside his wagon on the Gower Peninsula, where he now lives and works. The land behind him falls away towards the sea; on clear days, he can see across the water to North Devon. A year ago, such a view would have seemed unlikely. If someone had told him he would write a book, meet the woman who would become his partner and leave the West Country for South Wales, he would not have believed a word of it. “You never know,” he says, but there is still surprise in his voice.
Paul’s route to this point has not been linear. Born in Essex, he left for New Zealand at four when his parents emigrated. His childhood there was spent outside: fishing, swimming in rivers and roaming. At fifteen, he returned to Essex and found himself at odds with a built-up landscape that felt constricting. As soon as he could, he bought an old van and headed west. The countryside he found in the West Country was different from that of his childhood, yet recognisable in spirit: people shaped by the natural environment, by the needs of their livestock and by the seasons.
Hedgelaying offered him a way in. The craft, which involves partially cutting and bending living stems to create a thick, stock-proof barrier, is at once practical and beautiful. A well-laid hedge keeps cattle and sheep where they belong; it also provides dense habitat for nesting birds and small mammals. For Paul, the appeal was never purely ecological. It was the sense of continuity, of doing work that would have been understood by the old boys who once held court in village pubs, men who may not have had formal qualifications but possessed hard-won knowledge of land and weather.
In his book, that knowledge is described as “old wisdom”: methods honed over generations because they worked and because ‘progress’ had yet to cull their way of life. Hedgerows have long been part of Britain’s agricultural landscape. From early earth banks and ditches marking boundaries to the proliferation of hedges during and after the parliamentary Enclosure Acts, they have shaped the patchwork seen from an aircraft window. The motives behind enclosure were often harsh, tied to profit and the displacement of rural labour. Yet the resulting network of hedgerows created linear woodland habitats in a country with comparatively little tree cover.
Above: The preserver of hedgerows with the accoutrements of his craft – bill hook, axe and converted horsebox
Paul is wary of romanticising the past. He knows that rural life was hard and that modern agriculture has had to respond to economic pressure and a growing population. He understands why large fields and heavy machinery became the norm in what has been termed the “great acceleration” of post-war farming. What he argues for is not a return to a time before the Common Agricultural Policy reaped its subsidised rape of the land, but a measure of balance: maintain the hedgerows that remain; restore those that can be restored; recognise that a hedge between two twenty-acre fields is not a quaint indulgence but a lifeline for wildlife.
That position places him in the thick of contemporary debate. He hears from those who object to the resultant ‘waste’ being burnt after a restoration job because of carbon emissions; from others who insist that chipping and spreading wood is preferable. He has seen tree surgeons arrive in fuel-hungry vehicles to process material that might otherwise have warmed him for weeks. “You do what you can,” he says. For him, laying a hedge is a small, tangible act of agrarian restoration. It is not a grand solution but a little movement in the right direction that contributes to a tipping point in the future.
The book itself emerged almost by accident. Encouraged by his daughters, Paul began posting photographs of his work on Instagram. The images of freshly laid hedges, stakes aligned and binders tight, attracted a following that now numbers well into six figures. One day, a message arrived from a writer – Lara Maiklem – who had found in his posts an echo of her own childhood memories of a hedgelayer on her family’s farm. She passed his details to her literary agent. A proposal followed; meetings in London; then a contract and a request to deliver a manuscript within months.
He wrote as he worked: in bursts of concentration. Wet days were spent in the wagon with the stove lit, wood crackling in the grate, accompanying the tapping at a keyboard. Fine days were for the hedge. The two modes fed each other. As he describes it, writing became a form of mindfulness akin to laying: attention narrowed to the task, the mind occupied with the angle of a cut or the cadence of a sentence. When the hardback appeared, readers responded not only to the craft but to the rhythms of an outdoor life entrenched in the seasons and weather. There is a sense that you are getting the real McCoy with Paul, the antithesis of the polished and marketed fake that we witness every day in the form of television commercials or billboard ads.
That appetite extends beyond the page. Paul runs courses in hedgelaying, and the participants are not only farmers or smallholders. Estate agents, solicitors and corporate professionals arrive, pull on gloves and take up a billhook. Many will never lay another hedge, yet they leave with a section completed and a photograph to prove it. He suspects that what they seek is less a new skill than a different kind of attention: a physically active day measured in cuts and stakes rather than emails. Hopefully, one they will evangelise about later.
His own life has altered since the book’s publication. Based now on the Gower, he works from land divided by old banks and hedgerows, some of which he has restored himself. The domestic detail matters. He can step inside for tea; he can look up from his work and see the coast and, perhaps most importantly, the woman he loves. He speaks candidly about feeling fortunate, about recognising in midlife the value of moments once taken for granted.
Above: Out in the field
There is steel in him, too. He does not pretend that the countryside is unchanging or that it belongs to one group. He has watched house prices rise and villages shift in the personality that they offer up to the world to inspect; he has seen hawthorn ripped out and replaced with tidy laurel. He resists drawing battle lines, yet he is clear that some practices endure for a reason. The hedge laid well will thicken; the hedge flailed annually into a rifted line will fail. The difference is not the longing for a halcyon paradise but for something that functions holistically with the world.
As debates about rewilding, regenerative farming and temperate rainforest gather pace, Paul occupies a pragmatic middle ground. He accepts that Britain’s landscapes have been shaped by human management for millennia, from Bronze Age clearances to medieval field systems. He also accepts that biodiversity has suffered in recent decades. His answer is to acknowledge that food production and habitat need not be mutually exclusive.
In Of Thorn and Briar, the narrative of a year’s work becomes a meditation on belonging. It is not sentimental. There are accounts of cold rain driven across hills, of hands numbed and boots sodden. There is tea, lots of tea, drunk from enamel mugs and the glow of a stove at dusk. There is satisfaction in a line of stakes marching true along a bank. The prose is direct, occasionally wry, attentive to detail, with a steadiness and assurance that mirrors Paul’s craft.
In the end, the argument circles back to that first cut. A stem is partially severed and bent, not destroyed, but redirected for the common good. The hedge slowly thickens, transforming into both refuge and metaphorical guide, one that challenges current thinking that monetary gain (and the vacuous happiness it promises) should be the prime motivator for our actions. There is a message here if we care to look and be prepared to change.
Paul’s year, captured in clear-eyed prose, shows that such attentiveness and a more considered way of life are possible. It asks only that we look closely at what lies before us and consider how it might be nurtured in a better way.
