Pleach and Chorus: The Hedgers Bringing Lost Working Songs Back to Britain's Field Margins

Somewhere in a damp Herefordshire field in late November, four people are standing in a line along a hawthorn hedge that hasn't been properly managed in perhaps thirty years. They're not talking much. But every few minutes, the person at the near end of the line — a stocky woman in her forties called Ruth Preece — calls out something rhythmic, almost under her breath, and the others adjust their pace accordingly.

If you didn't know what you were listening for, you'd miss it entirely. It sounds like humming, or muttering, or the kind of noise someone makes when they're concentrating hard. But Ruth knows exactly what she's doing. She's been researching and reviving the working calls and songs of traditional hedge-laying for the better part of a decade, and this — four people moving in rough synchrony along a neglected boundary — is what that research looks like when it comes off the page and into the field.

A Craft That Never Quite Left

Hedge-laying is among the oldest forms of land management in Britain. The basic principle — partially cutting a young stem (the pleacher) low to the ground, bending it along the line of the hedge, and weaving it through upright stakes (the heatherings or binders, depending on your regional tradition) — creates a living barrier that is self-renewing, wildlife-rich, and far more effective as a windbreak and stock-proof boundary than any fence. The technique varies significantly by region: Midland style differs from Welsh, which differs from South of England, which differs again from the Lancashire and Yorkshire traditions of the north.

Mechanisation — specifically the flail mower, which can batter a field boundary into submission in a fraction of the time — largely displaced hand-laying through the latter half of the twentieth century. The result, visible across much of lowland Britain, is hedges that are wide, shapeless, gappy at the base, and ecologically impoverished. The revival of traditional laying, driven partly by agri-environment schemes and partly by a genuine cultural resurgence, has been gathering pace for at least twenty years. What's less well documented is the oral culture that surrounded the work.

"We've done a good job of recovering the physical techniques," says Ruth, pausing to assess a stem before she cuts. "The regional styles, the tool preferences, the timing. What we haven't really looked at is what people were saying and singing while they did it."

Calls, Counts and Coordination

Hedge-laying in gangs — as it was typically done before mechanisation, particularly at piece-rate on large estate farms — required coordination. Teams of four to eight workers would move along a hedge in sequence, each responsible for a section but dependent on the others keeping pace. Too fast and you'd run into the person ahead. Too slow and you'd hold the whole line up.

Rhythmic calls served a practical function here, similar in some ways to the work songs of sailors or the chants of ploughmen. They marked time, signalled transitions, and allowed a foreman or lead worker to manage pace without constant verbal instruction. Some were simple counts. Others were fragments of longer songs, worn down by repetition into something more like incantation than melody.

The problem, as Ruth and her collaborators at the Folk Hedge Project have discovered, is that almost none of this was systematically recorded. What survives is fragmentary — a phrase here in a farm diary, a snatch of rhyme there in an oral history interview, occasional references in agricultural journalism from the nineteenth century. Reconstructing a working tradition from these fragments requires both scholarly caution and a willingness to fill gaps creatively.

"We're honest about what we know and what we're inferring," says Tom Birchall, a sound archivist who has been working with the project. "We're not claiming to have found some complete lost tradition. But the fragments are real, and the function they served was real. We're trying to understand what that function was and whether it still makes sense."

Regional Voices, Regional Styles

One of the most striking things about the surviving fragments is how strongly they reflect regional identity. A counting rhyme collected in oral history recordings from Worcestershire in the 1970s uses local place names as rhythmic anchors. A call documented in a Lincolnshire farm diary from the 1890s includes dialect words for specific stages of the laying process that have no direct equivalents in standard English.

In Wales, where hedge-laying traditions run alongside a much more robustly documented oral culture, the connections are sometimes more direct. Plygain singing — the early-morning carol tradition of mid-Wales — and the rhythmic patterns of some Welsh hedging calls share structural features that suggest a common musical inheritance, even if the functions were completely different.

"Language and landscape go together," says Sioned Parry, a Welsh folk musician who has collaborated with the Folk Hedge Project on workshops in Powys. "The rhythms that made sense for working on a particular kind of ground in a particular kind of weather — those rhythms found their way into other kinds of singing too. It all comes from the same root."

Teaching the Ear Alongside the Hand

The practical question facing Ruth and her collaborators is how to integrate this oral dimension into hedge-laying training without it feeling contrived or academic. The National Hedgelaying Society runs courses and competitions across the UK, and there's a well-established pedagogy for the physical craft. Adding a musical or vocal component is a different challenge.

"You can't just hand someone a sheet of rhymes and tell them to chant while they work," Ruth says, laughing. "It has to feel natural, or it feels ridiculous. So we start with the rhythm of the work itself — the cut, the bend, the weave — and we find the sounds that fit that rhythm. Then we see if any of the historical fragments map onto it."

In practice, this means workshops that begin with physical work and introduce vocal elements gradually, often through call-and-response patterns that are easy to learn and immediately functional. Participants are often surprised by how quickly a rhythm takes hold when it's tied to a physical action.

"By the end of a day, people are doing it without thinking," says Tom. "That's when you know it's working. When it stops being a performance and starts being part of how you work."

More Than a Soundtrack

Back in the Herefordshire field, the afternoon light is going golden and the section of hedge the team has laid looks, frankly, beautiful — the pleachers woven at a gentle angle, the stakes evenly spaced, the whole thing low and dense and alive with the potential of next spring's growth.

Ruth calls a halt, and for a moment the four of them just stand in the quiet. The calls have stopped. The field is its own kind of silence.

"People ask me if this is about nostalgia," she says, pulling off her gloves. "It isn't. Nostalgia is about wanting things back the way they were. This is about understanding what was useful and asking whether it's still useful now. The hedge is useful. The knowledge of how to lay it is useful. And the sounds that helped people do it well — those might be useful too."

The hawthorn doesn't care either way. But come spring, it will be putting out new growth along the line of every pleacher, filling in the gaps, making itself solid. The hedge, like the songs, is working its way back.