Irish Examiner 03/04/2023 - Get off the fence

I’d be delighted to be wrong. Please tell me it’s all perfectly done for the right reasons, and it only looks like carnage to the untrained eye.

But I don’t know. The absolute state of the place makes me feel glum.

I’m talking about hedges. Those very Irish things that we take for granted. You notice when they’re gone. You’re on the Continent and they just have a road and a field or a house and the whole place feels unguarded. If a cow broke out in France, what would stop it getting all the way to the Urals?

Not us, though. We have our ditches, our hedges. Things to peer over or wish you were in a bus. When you’re driving past, the tiny gaps and the persistence of vision give you are sort of flipbook animation of what’s going on behind.

Except now, we can see over them more and more.

Because, bloody hell, the butchery that you see on the roads now. 

I seem to remember that hedge trimming used to be a relatively precise operation. I’m not saying it was all by hand, and an enigmatic man with a bicycle and a dog and a scythe, maintaining the gullies and hedges. Though that was important too - every village and town remembers and values its roadman. 

But also, there were tasty men with mowers that seemed to leave a nice A-shaped, road-safety-conscious ditch after them.

Now though, it looks like a Transformer has been past. Either the ditch is sawn off so that the profile is a weird Fresh Prince of Bel-Air flat top. And the cross-section is a requiem to the thorn trees that were once there.

Or else it’s flailed. Trees minding their own business lashed out of it by this mechanical overseer that seems to just punish them. Branches hanging off, fresh wounds visible into which disease can get.

There are good reasons for things that look bad superficially so I’m happy to be an eejit. Sometimes you need to clear stuff because of fire. I’m really hoping that’s why the little havens have been cleared along motorways. Also moving vegetation a few feet further from the edge of the motorway means that insects are moved a bit further back from the traffic and less of them get killed. 

And I know nothing about hedge management, except I know you can’t just leave them be. They are man-made objects that got natural whether we intended it or not. There is engineering to hedges. Thorn trees need to be manipulated to intermesh and form a stock-proof fence. The early stage of a fence looks rough. There is lopping and sawing and bending and it doesn’t look all Darling Buds of May straight away.

There are hold-your-nose reasons. Like accommodating broadband and electricity wires. A trade-off with having a thriving rural community. If it has to be done fair enough. But perhaps minimise the battering.

And eventually all the ash will have to come down because it’s dying of disease. (Our fault, natch.)

Then there are the bad reasons. Perverse financial incentives that reward bulldozing away hedges or battering them into submission because more land is available. Everyone needs to make a few bob, so that few bob has to be replaced somehow. 

But good hedges are good for land in the long run.

Or someone building a swanky new architect-y house and wants everyone to see it for miles. But why not retain the mystery?

Then there’s ignorance where people don’t know the damage they are doing. Or people who know but don’t give a shite.

But at the moment a trip around the country looks depressing, we need to get off the ditch about it.