Two Hundred Metres of Hedge

Hedgelaying is not trimming a hedge.

Trimming is what a tractor does with a flail in September. Laying is a craft done by hand in the winter and it takes about four hours to do six metres, and the point of it is not tidiness.

The point is that a hedge, left alone, goes up. It becomes a line of small trees with gaps at the bottom, and a hedge with gaps at the bottom does not do the one thing a hedge is for, which is to stop a cow.

The cut

You cut each stem almost through, low down, at an angle. Not through — almost through. You leave a tongue of living wood perhaps a centimetre thick.

Then you bend the stem over, nearly horizontal, and weave it in with its neighbours, and drive a stake in every half metre to hold the whole thing.

The stem does not die. That is the part that nobody believes the first time. It goes on living through that centimetre of tongue, and in the spring it throws new growth vertically all along its length, and by the third year you have a hedge that is thick from the ground up and will hold stock without a wire.

It lasts about fifteen years. Then you do it again.

Ceri

Ceri Vaughan is twenty-nine and has been laying for four winters, which makes her, in the local judgement, about a quarter of the way to knowing what she is doing.

She learned from Dai Powell, who is eighty-one, and who taught her the way he was taught, which is by standing next to her and saying almost nothing and occasionally taking the billhook off her.

In four winters he has given her, by her count, eleven pieces of verbal instruction.

She can recite all eleven.

The eleven

Four of them are about the angle of the cut.

Three are about where to stand, which she thought was fussiness for the whole of the first winter and which she now understands is the difference between doing six metres in four hours and doing six metres in seven.

Two are about the stakes.

One is: "Don't be frightened of it."

And one, delivered in her second winter when she had left a stem too thick and it had split rather than bent, was: "That one's gone. Get on."

She thinks about that one about once a fortnight in contexts that have nothing to do with hedges.

The field

The hedge on the top field at Pen-y-Bryn is two hundred metres and was last laid in 2009 by Dai and a man called Emrys who has since died.

Ceri is doing it this winter. Alone, mostly. Dai comes up two mornings a week and stands there.

Two hundred metres at six metres in four hours is about a hundred and thirty hours, which across a winter of short days and bad weather is most of December, January and February.

She is paid for eighty of those hours by an environmental scheme. The other fifty are hers.

What she thinks about

Not much, which is the appeal.

The work is absorbing at exactly the level that occupies the front of the mind and leaves the back of it alone. She has solved more problems on that hedge than at any desk she has ever sat at.

There is also the matter of the previous lay.

Because when you lay a hedge that was laid fifteen years ago, you are working on somebody else's decisions. You can see where they stood. You can see the angle they favoured. You can see, in one stretch of about eleven metres in the middle, that somebody was in a hurry or was tired or was arguing with someone, because the stakes are wrong and the pleaching is rough and it has grown out badly ever since.

Ceri asked Dai about that stretch in January.

He looked at it for a while.

Then he said: "That's mine. Emrys did the good bit."

The competition

There is a hedgelaying competition in March. Ceri has entered twice and placed once, seventh of eleven, in a class she is aware was not strong.

Dai does not enter and never has and refuses to discuss why.

He came to watch in 2023 and stood at the back of a field for five hours in the rain and said, afterwards, four words about her work, which she has also memorised and which she is not going to repeat to anybody.

The last week

She finished the two hundred metres on the eleventh of February, which is late, and did the last twenty metres in a hurry because the weather was coming.

She knew as she was doing it that it was not her best work.

She has been back up twice since to look at it, which is a thing she has learned not to admit to.

Dai came up on the Thursday. He walked the whole two hundred metres, slowly, which took him about twenty minutes.

At the end he said: "Last bit's rushed."

"I know."

"Fifteen years, that," he said. "You'll be looking at it a while."

Then he said the other thing, which is the twelfth piece of instruction in four winters and which she wrote down that evening.

He said: "Mind — so will whoever does it next. And they'll know it was you."