Ihave spent much time walking amongst the hedgerows. I didn’t intend to become so intimate with them in Ireland, Wales, or England, but hedgerows are impossible to ignore. As boundary markers and livestock barriers, they quite force your path. Tall, dense, and thorny, they insist that you walk along their margins, obediently following their patchwork maze until you find a stile or a gap to squeeze through. Having spent most of my life in American cities, I had naively thought of hedgerows as perfectly coifed monoculture bushes planted in formal, orderly rows. But a traditionally managed or conservation-laid hedgerow is, in fact, a brilliant human-created habitat—an ecotone—that resembles an unruly woodland edge. Hedgerow creation and stewardship in Britain have roots dating back to the Bronze Age, and some of the hedges I followed had been growing in the same spot for hundreds of years. As I walked, I met many familiar faces: blackberries weighed down by their fruits, cleavers creeping amongst the dandelion and plantain, and nettle, always quick to chide me for not noticing her soon enough. Rowan, blackthorn, and Elder made regular appearances, too, and I was happy to come across my dear friends Mugwort,Violet, and Rose.
Encountering myriad species within the hedge is by no means unique to my experience. Christopher Hart, author of Hedgelands: A wild wander around Britain’s greatest habitat, writes that the most generous hedgerows:
should include shrubs, trees and bushes, coppiced and/or cut and laid forming a row…such as blackthorn, hawthorn, dog rose, and crab apple…Above this main scrubby, shrubby line that is the classic hedgerow will, ideally, tower some fine mature trees, with some showing signs of decay: not too many, though – one every few dozen yards is ideal. And then cladding the sides of the hedgerow all the way along, spilling down to ground level, will be ivy, bindweed, and brambles, and then smaller flowers like celandines and dandelions, bluebells and perhaps even orchids…If of sufficient age, the entire hedge may sit on top of a venerable earthen bank, offering a whole new range of home-making possibilities to burrowing rabbits, badgers, stoats, and so on, while the very best hedge will also feature a good damp ditch.1
According to the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds, hedgerows may support up to 80 percent of woodland birds, 50 percent of mammals, and 30 percent of butterflies in Britain.2 With Hart adding that “1,000 plant species or more have been recorded in British hedgerows over the years, nearly a third of the total of some 3,500 or so species native to the UK.”3 Hedgerows then, are small but mighty ecosystems that are an invaluable resource for wildlife, providing food, shelter, and safe passage between other isolated ecosystems in intensively farmed areas.
Perhaps this is why hedgerows have earned the favor and fascination of naturalists, botanists, and biologists, including Charles Darwin. Thirteen years after planting a generous hedgerow along his daily walking path at his home in Kent, Darwin dedicated the final paragraph of On the Origin of Species to this liminal ecology, writing: “It is interesting to contemplate an entangled bank, clothed with many plants of many kinds, with birds singing on the bushes, with various insects flitting about, and with worms crawling through the damp earth…”4 Many years later, still contemplating the vitality of such entangled life, Darwin observed that at least two dozen new plants had sprung up in his hedge, planted not by him, but by residents of the hedgerow itself.5 The life hedges cultivate and support not only sustain the ecology, but enrich and perpetuate it.
It will be of little surprise, given their abundance of life and liminal nature, that hedgerows are also reported to be the haunts of super-natural beings, particularly the little-folk. Indeed, hedgerows are ripe with otherworldly folklore. As literal and symbolic boundaries, hedgerows are often said to act as magical gateways or contain the doors to fairy homes. Ecologically, with the presence of many plants associated with fairies like elder, blackthorn, and rowan, it is only natural that sightings of the little-folk would be common—just as we might expect to see honeybees visiting bee balm.
Hedgerows are the site of several fairy encounters recorded by W.Y. Evans-Wentz as part of his ethnographic fieldwork in the early 1900s. The personal stories he gathered across Wales, Scotland, Ireland, Cornwall, Brittany, and the Isle of Man would eventually become the core of his important publication The Fairy-Faith in Celtic Countries. In one such story, a farmer named Pat witnesses the gentry (or fairy) army near a hedge, sharing that:
Old people used to say the gentry were in the mountains; that is certain, but I never could be quite sure of it myself. One night, however, near midnight, I did have a sight: I set out from Bantrillick to come home, and near Ben Bulbin there was the greatest army you ever saw, five or six thousand of them in armour shining in the moonlight. A strange man rose out of the hedge and stopped me, for a minute, in the middle of the road. He looked into my face, and then let me go.6
Elsewhere a carpenter offers a more lighthearted interaction:
I was making a coffin here in the shop, and, after tea, my apprentice was late returning; he was out by the hedge just over there looking at a crowd of little people kicking and dancing. One of them came up and asked him what he was looking at; and this made him run back to the shop. When he described what he had seen, I told him they were nothing but fairies.7
Well over 100 years later, people are still encountering the little-folk near hedgerows. The Fairy Census: 2014–2017 specifically documents the sightings of fairies around the world through self-submitted experiences. From their records, hedges are explicitly mentioned as sites for encounters with the otherworldly. People from Britain, Ireland, and the United States share stories of lights dancing within the hedges, witnessing small humanoid beings appear, losing time while walking along hedgerows, and even being chased away by an unseen presence.8
Folklore also has much to teach us about the need to protect hedgerows. In Britain, hedge habitats are threatened by intensification of industrial agriculture and it is routinely estimated that there has been a 50% reduction of hedgerows since the 1950s. A 2007 report indicates that of those remaining managed hedgerows, only 48% are structurally sound.9 Because of their association with fairies, folk wisdom has long warned against the destruction of hedgerows, especially if they are in the vicinity of a fairy dwelling. For instance, in Ireland, it is considered unlucky to cut a hedge that grows near a fairy fort. Those that are foolish enough to do so risk injury or sudden death. There are over 100 accounts recorded in The Schools’ Collection that associate hedges with fairy forts and the majority of them include a warning against harming the hedge habitats, especially their trees. One such entry about a fort in Drumcalpin, Co. Cavan notes:
This fort is a circular shape and there is a hedge growing round it. The hedge is made of white thorn bushes and hazel trees. There are three ash trees growing in the centre of the fort. The land has never yet been cultivated, because long ago a man was going to cultivate the land of this fort. He stuck a stick down to see was there good clay there. But the stick came up with such force, that it hit him in the head, and he died in three days after. A lot of lights have been seen in the fort.10
Sometimes, however, transgressors are lucky enough to simply be scared away. Another entry from The Schools’ Collection shares that:
Some of these forts are very picturesque and one in the Drumona district has a beautiful white-thorn hedge encircling it and in the centre also a large white thorn is growing. This fort is in Mr. Beirne’s field. Some people say that music and dancing are heard and lights are seen in this fort previous to deaths in some families.There were two boys about fifty years ago who began cutting the bushes growing in the fort. The stems of the bushes spurted blood and the boys fled to their homes very frightened and since then no bush or shrub was interfered with in that fort.11
Whether or not your understanding of biodiversity is inclusive of the supernatural, hedgerows are undeniably vital and vibrant ecologies that support interactions between communities and ecosystems.
Through weaving webs of relations across worlds, hedges become more than a sum of their myriad constituents. Rather, they come alive. So the next time you are walking or driving along a hedgerow, take a moment to be present and participate. Slow down. Sit. Watch. Listen. Smell. Sow seeds. Collect blackberries. And be open to what—or perhaps who—you might encounter in these edge ecologies. By embracing and celebrating liminality, we open ourselves (and the world) up to new possibilities and pathways to our collective future flourishing.
Margaux Crump is a gardener and interdisciplinary artist exploring the entanglements between ecology, spirituality, and power. She is currently investigating the phenomena of unseen worlds, from the microscopic to the parallel mythic realms that surround us. Follow her on Instagram @margauxcrump
References
1. Christopher Hart, Hedgelands: A wild wander around Britain’s greatest habitat, (Chelsea Green Publishing, 2024) 5–6.
4. Charles Darwin, On the Origin of Species, (John Murray, 1859), 489.
5. Charles Darwin (1880), Hedge-row in sand-walk planted by self across a field years ago. CUL-DAR205.2.209. Edited by John van Wyhe (Darwin Online, http://darwin-online.org.uk/)
6. W.Y. Evans-Wentz, The Fairy Faith in Celtic Countries, (Oxford University Press, 1911), 57.
7. Evans-Wentz, The Fairy Faith in Celtic Countries, 124.
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