... in which he explains the history of hedges to me and induces me to admire them... but still not to like them when they're hemming in my roads! Nonetheless, they've a fascinating history.
Vocabulary point, since a UK reader questioned it: In Cornwall, "hedge" means stone wall covered with vegetation. Dave tells me that the exact same thing -- stone wall covered with vegetation -- is called a "bank" in Devon. Feel free to comment below with what stone walls are called in your parts!
Right now we are WWOOFing at a splendid place called Cotna in Cornwall. This is Dave, one of those guys with a slow easy voice and easy way so that he's really fun to hang out with. He also is very kind and very good about teaching. He has taught me a jillion in just a few days, and Yarrow quite a bit in the days before that.
Here he is bottling cider made from the apples in the orchard. We have been pruning apple trees for the past few days and he'd mentioned the cider needed bottling too, so we did that yesterday afternoon. The cat's name is Heidi (or possibly "Hidey" -- she's a very sneak-inny kitty). The cruisey sweet dog, who doesn't even irritate our militant cat Clara, is named Cootie, which Sara says means "little" in India.
There is another black dog named Billie and another black cat, one who looks exactly like my Ala, named Ziggy. She seems to have the same quiet-but-independently-feisty personality that Ala does. Dave told me that Ziggy lived her with the previous owners, but while they took her brother away and he kept walking back here and getting caught and taken back, Ziggy hid out for three months. Finally she figured the danger was past and showed up at the house door, ready to be fed.
On the bucket list: get a photo of Ziggy and Ala together.
Another thing they do here is make sourdough bread. Dave and Sara have invested time in teaching me how do do that. Here's what I wrote about that on Facebook yesterday:
I am here in Cornwall making sourdough bread with my WWOOF hosts -- we just bottled a bunch of apple cider, which was made by crushing the apples with their skins on -- and nothing else -- just the apples and the yeast / bacteria nature gave them (this blows me away. I had no idea you could do that -- people never needed to eat flat bread!) . This left an inch of sediment in the bottles of the demi-johns (as they call the bottles here), so I said to the host, hey, why don't we make some bread with that? He had just brought me over some of their sourdough starter (about 6 years old) to the barn where we use the kitchen. So we did, start up two sourdoughs with the sludge from the cider (inspired by a friend at our medieval culinary group making awesome bread from beer and wine yeasts in the past). So this is basically apple bread, which will be bread in a few days because bread takes days here (they do it all cold and slow, not beside the fire and mere hours of rising like I was taught). Then we cleaned up and went for a walk and he told me about bronze age funeral pots found here and hedges the way they were in medieval days and stuff like that. (more on that in this blog post)
Anyway, my Facebook friends have heard me complain about hedges around the roads here. They block the views. Dave has set me straiGHt with some stories of the histories of hedges... I still don't love them in their role blocking my view and hemming me in while I'm driving. But his stories are great.
After we bottled 4 demi-johns (making 24 bottles of cider), we headed out to walk the dogs. We went through the woods where Dave explained about sessile oaks (native, and branching, and several 400-year-old ones on our path along the old mill stream), Turkey oaks (which seemed like a good idea as they're straight and tall and people planted loads of them 150 years ago, but turned out to have sort of rotten useless wood), and honeysuckle, and willows, and ash trees, and mountain ash trees (which aren't ash), and brambles, and hazels. We were cutting some hazel wood on the weekend, and he was showing me where if you cut hazel, they just spring up and give you loads more wood. They're great that way.
Where the hazel trees (yes, they give hazelnuts too!) grow big, brambles don't grow, but when you cut the hazels down (or anywhere light hits the floor), brambles go nuts.
If you squint a bit you can see this is the old mill house. There's an old guy who grew up in the farm house but then moved away to America, who came by about 5 or 7 years ago, when he was in his 80s, and told Dave and Sara all about how it used to be here. Where their house, the old barn, now is, there used to be a shanty town of itinerant workers every year popping up.
And this was a mill house for whoever ran the mill (probably a timber mill, but maybe a corn mill, Dave says there are no records). It was a perfectly good house, and the only reason it and many others are ruins now is because in the 1970s landowners went around pulling the roofs off spare houses just so that "beatniks" wouldn't live in them. Sigh. Destroy a house to avoid sharing. Kosher, right? Sigh.
Another wall of that house. Sigh.
Then we walked up the church road.
This is a stile across a wall. Now about these hedges. They block out all the views, so they do. I find their unnecessary tallness very pesky when wanting to see the view! I mentioned this in the course of working on something or other and Dave started telling me more about them.
1. Some of them go back to the Bronze Age, he reckons. Well, that's cool. There's one that is buried under the straw bale place that I'm sitting in right now. The people who built it just sort of bulldozed the stone hedge underneath. As you do.
Anyway, I like these stiles that are made to go across walls.
It happens that that particular stile connects to break-your-neck hill on a church road that people have been walking on at least 1500 years, Dave says. Yes, the hill is steep. The road reminded me a lot of the survey cutlines at home beside fencelines, except walked by a lot more people, but you can't really tell, stuff grows so fast here. And an interesting thing that I somehow did not properly photograph here, the path then goes _not_ straight towards the church in Gorran Church Town, but sort of off to the side. When you get to the top of the hill, the path veers left straight towards the church.
Dave explained that this is because until 1940, all of the hedges would have had elms planted on the tops of them, and though now we can see the church tower from this whole field, for most of that 1500 years, you couldn't because of the elms. (in the 1940s Dutch Elm Disease came over from America and at the same time farmers got tractors with flails to trim hedges, so most of the biodiversity and timber-harvesting purpose of the hedges was lost).
But back to the path -- when you get to the top of the hill, you can see the tall church tower over the line of the elms, so you veer straight towards the church again. And as we did, and as Dave noted as we did it, we walked that same curving path even though we could now see the church (and we weren't going to church, anyway, we were just on a walk with the dogs, though the dogs stayed around in the valley, where there was nobody for them to bother anyway. Not nearly as many people living here as used to do).
If you take a look at this photo, you can see on the left that the hedges (aka stone walls) have been bulldozed and trampled and tractored and ignored, a fact that dismays Dave. but on the right there you can see trees growing atop the walls. According to Dave that's hedges done right, so it is. He says all of the firewood would have come from the hedges back in the day when there were still a lot of people here instead of tractors. A big wood like he has full of hazel trees would rarely exist. That land would have been productive for crops, and the wood would all be grown on the hedges.
This is Cotna eco-retreat, the farm where we're staying.
These are trees growing properly on a hedge.
And here are some more.
This is Clara, Yarrow's cat, up very high in a tree!
A bird's nest in the apple orchard.
A stone hedge with her stones showing.
R
A cow, similar to the ones of old. Her friend was in the bushes to the right, chomping around. Gotta admire cows that'll eat in the brier patch, so you do.
THAT ridiculous snakey thing in the middle is what they call a road in Cornwall. This miserable twisty little thing squashed between rock walls and you keep having to stop and/or back up when you come to another car or sometimes even to pedestrians because there's really not room for passing. Seriously, we came to two people walking dogs today on our way away from this walk and they ran ahead to find a cranny or a nook to hide in so we could squeeze past with our wee car Lady Pip.
Speaking of massive stone walls... this is part of a neolithic fort on the headland there.
Mevagissey, a short walk down the valley from Cotna.
This is Mevagissey. Dave says there was a village here since ancient times, definitely since medieval times, but most of the buildings in town now would be Victorian.
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