The hedges and the labyrinth

I am looking for a rock. Specifically, a hunk of granite with a flat vertical ‘face’ and a long ‘tail’ (think of a loaf of bread with the crust end face on). The angle between the front and underside must be at least 90 degrees. And it also needs to tesselate with the rock to its left and the one underneath which, of course, are both uneven. I am learning to construct a Cornish hedge, and my brain has never had to think quite so three dimensionally.

I specify ‘Cornish’ because in this part of the world, a hedge is not a hedgerow nor even a dry-stone wall, but something unique to the county. Each one comprises a central core of compressed sub-sub-soil—which, in Cornwall, is decomposed granite or ‘rab’—retained by two stone walls and capped with topsoil, turf or ‘tubbins,’ and sometimes even a hedgerow, just to confuse matters. In cross-section, the hedge is shaped like a lighthouse or an oak tree, with each stone angled down towards the centre and stone-to-stone contact at the facing edges. This gives it a structural integrity that gravity only strengthens over time: you shouldn’t be able to move, let alone pull out, any individual stone. There are 30,000 linear miles of such hedges in Cornwall, representing a million hours of combined labour.

The craft has recently come to public attention for two reasons. First was the council’s well-intentioned attempt to line A3075 Newquay Road with Cornish hedges as part of a £330m project to dual the A30. They were poorly constructed and started to tumble down within days, providing a cautionary tale about the skill required to create structures that should last 100 years without repairs and millennia if taken care of. Archaeologists have dated hedges on the Penwith peninsula to the Late Neolithic or early Bronze Age. At 3,800 years old, they are the oldest man-made structures in the world still in use for their original purpose, contemporary with the later Egyptian pyramids.

The second is a happier story. Kerdroya is a 56-metre-wide piece of land art on the edge of Colliford Lake on Bodmin Moor, constructed entirely from Cornish hedges. From above, you can see that the hedges form the concentric circles of a labyrinth. Some are full height and turf-topped to make a map of Cornwall, while those ‘in the sea’ will be lower when completed.  The name is taken from the Cornish for ‘labyrinth’ (literally ‘turning castle,’). ‘Land art’ is a reluctant categorisation, but the creative force behind the project, Will Coleman, is adamant that this is not a tourist attraction: it’s not even signposted off the main road. If you can find it, the invitation is to walk its 750-metre winding path to the centre and back out again, passing 12 different regional styles of hedging along the way.

Historically, Cornish hedges would have been built from whatever materials were available—the rab, tubbins and topsoil often dug out from either side of the hedge, and the rock cleared from fields for farming. Where granite is the local stone, you might see what I have been attempting to build: a ‘vertically pitched coursed hedge,’ better known colloquially as a row of ‘grounders’ (the heavy boulders half-buried as the bottom layer of most Cornish hedges) topped with ‘uprights,’ ‘edgers,’ or ‘soldiers’—a style Coleman has dubbed ‘souderigyon’ (‘little soldiers’). Where slate is more prevalent, a herringbone arrangement known as ‘Jakka ha Jenna’ (‘Jack and Jenny’) is more likely. Individual hedgers are also said to have mixed specific seeds into their topsoil so they could be recognised from the wildflowers that eventually covered their work.

Unlike a maze, there is only one way in and one way out of Kerdroya; walking a labyrinth is intended to be meditative. Coleman often says ‘Yn milhyntal yth omgellir, yn kerdroya yth omgevir’ (‘In a maze you get lost, in a labyrinth you find yourself’) and there is a sense of finding, not only yourself, but Cornish heritage, culture and identity in this place, which already has a sense of the ancient about it.

‘In Cornwall, hedges are the landscape,’ emphasises Helen Bowkett, my Cornish hedging teacher. ‘They are the patterning of everything. Locals and visitors alike get emotionally attached to them, whether that’s because of the colourful spring wildflowers or the abundant late summer blackberries. We’ve lost so much freedom and access to land, but the hedges and edges are still ours. We can still gather flowers or forage fruit and feel connected with our ancestors. They are a portal to the wild and to deep time.’

The beginnings of a resurgence in hedging has given those with a connection to the county a way to embody their Cornish identity. ‘People are starting to add hedging to the list of things they do to feel Cornish,’ says Coleman. ‘They can learn the language; they can go gig rowing and they can learn to build and repair a Cornish hedge.’ I have come to this course fresh off the back of a Cornish language writing residency, so I smile as I mentally add gig rowing to my list of ways to reconnect with my homeland.

It's a reawakening that has come just in the nick of time. When Coleman conceived Kerdroya, inspired by a ‘finger labyrinth’ carved into the rock face at Rocky Valley near Tintangel that was initially thought to be contemporary with Cornwall’s oldest hedges, he assumed the Cornish Guild of Hedgers could build it. However, when he got in touch, he discovered they had just 13 working members (including Bowkett, their only female member at the time).

It was this awareness that led to Cornish hedging being listed as ‘endangered’ on the Heritage Crafts’ Red List and spurred Bowkett to co-found the Cornwall Rural Education and Skills Trust (CREST) in 2023. Within two years, CREST has offered 200 training places. ‘Preserving Cornish hedging is crucial for many reasons, which extend beyond physical hedges,’ says Mary Lewis, head of craft sustainability at Heritage Crafts. ‘Cornish hedging is not just a technique; it's a living part of Cornwall's history, landscape, and identity. In an era of environmental emergency, this traditional method offers valuable lessons as well as wildlife habitats, providing shelter, food, and corridors for a diverse range of flora and fauna. Without the skills to build and repair hedges, these ecological benefits will diminish, severely impacting local ecosystems.’

She’s right. According to Cornwall Wildlife Trust, Cornish hedges support up to 600 different species of flowering plant, and more than 10,000 species of invertebrates, including critically endangered pollinators. Bowkett describes them as ‘linear forests’, and the presence of bluebells suggests they are often all that is left of ancient woodlands.

Cornish hedges were not conceived as a signal of ownership, but as a way to provide shelter and protection. Boots and shoe soles were sometimes buried inside them to ward off evil spirits and, although our own lineage is broken, Bowkett argues that if other indigenous belief systems are anything to go by, our ancestors may have even believed in the animacy of the stones. Some, such as the Dyak people of Borneo, believe that the souls of their ancestors can reside in specific stones, so it’s not much of a stretch to imagine Cornish hedge builders carefully placing certain stones within hedges as a means of protection.

The preservation of craft skills is vital and what are known as ‘craft hedges’ are important to showcase those skills, but CREST has also developed a more rustic style called a ‘field context’ hedge. ‘Cornish hedges have a role to play in climate adaptation,’ says Bowkett. A well-maintained hedge supports more biodiversity than one that is left unrepaired, but perfectly ‘dressed’ (shaped) and tessellating stones offer less space for nature. On her own farm on a windy hill above Penzance, Bowkett is constructing hedges a metre wider than is traditional to allow more space for the roots of the trees she plans to plant on top of them.

The proverb, ‘blessed are those who plant trees under whose shade they will never sit,’ comes to mind and Cornish hedging is a craft practiced in what Coleman calls the ‘long now.’ He has half-joked that Kerdroya won’t be finished for another 100 years nor fully matured for another 4,000. He describes it as a message for people not yet born and, although he won’t be drawn on exactly what that message might be, he does concede that it’s a message of hope. ‘I love the idea of somebody finding Kerdroya—perhaps in a post-apocalyptic world—and saying “This is a thing of beauty and wonder. Somebody put energy and craft into this; somebody cared,”’ he says.

Towards the end of our Cornish hedging course, Bowkett suggests that we bury a time capsule inside the hedge we’ve been building. Because of the broken lineage in our own indigenous ancestry, she references as concept used by Indigenous communities elsewhere in the world, including the Haudenosaunee (Iroquois) and Anishinaabe, to make important decisions—they think about the effect on people in seven generations time. She asks us to bury something for those people to find. She tells us that, if walking the boundary of her farm four times represents life on earth, with every stride equivalent to a million years, the 30cm she has drawn out of a tape measure represents human existence. She then shares that we have extracted as many resources in our lifetimes—mere millimetres on that tape measure—as the whole of humanity used before us. The only thing I can think to put into the time capsule is the word ‘sorry’. I write it over and over again onto a piece of paper, drop it into a metal bottle alongside messages from the rest of my cohort, and we bury it inside our hedge. ‘I'm sorry’—a message of reconciliation, but also one of hope—that we did enough; that there is anyone left to forgive us in seven generations’ time.