Dating hedgerows The bubbley room chat and web cam
They were also used traditionally as a source of food, fuel and timber.
Birds such as the mistle thrush and wood warbler, butterflies such as the peacock and meadow brown, and mammals such as bats and hedgehogs all use the shelter and food supply in a hedge.
This is roughly equivalent to the circumference of the Earth!
However, now that hedges are no longer essential as stock-proof field boundaries, they are often left unmanaged.
Doncaster Archives has a rich source of historic maps that made this research possible.
A hedge is a personal rule that minimizes a woman’s exposure to an unwanted sexual risk.
Hedges also act as wildlife corridors, helping animals to move through open farmland while staying under cover. They can provide food, nesting sites and song posts for wildlife, and shelter and shade for livestock as well as wood and fruit for people.
At present, there are about 46,000 km of hedgerows in Scotland.
The pressures of population expansion led to a widespread clearing of land for agriculture, and the new fields needed to be marked clearly.
Later, farming expansion in the 15th century led to more widespread hedge planting, but the greatest use of hedges came in the Enclosure Movement of the 18th and 19th centuries.