Slicing down our verdant hedgerow heritage

In late August, the hedgerows wear their summer growth like a rumpled green fleece, all tangled strands and airy spaces, even the first pale curls of old man's beard, perhaps, in the lanes down south. A dark gloss of blackberries, a glow of of hips and haws, speak of the harvest stored up for wildlife. This, at least, is how it should be.

Daphne Pochin Mould has spent much of a long life photographing the Irish landscape, both from her pilot's seat and at field-level.

Her camera eye remains quite undimmed - unless, on occasion, by tears of frustration as she travels the boreens around her home at Aherla in Co Cork.

"Here in Cork and Kerry," she wrote last week, "driving our roads is a misery. Our entire roadside wildlife is being wiped out. I do not refer to needed hedge trimming, but wholesale destruction by powerful machinery.

"We had very lovely and well-controlled roadsides here, with hawthorn, blackthorn, spindle, wild roses, honeysuckle, and below them scabious, meadowsweet and primroses. All gone, to a shorn, brown, roadside ridge of drying grass.

"I thought hedge-cutting was a winter job, but it is going on here now. Our narrow boreens are being worked by two huge machines, one cutting vertically, the other horizontally. Verge cutting is in full swing, too, even on roads like the Cousane Gap, nearly 1,000 feet up. Do our visitors want this brown Ireland? Do we want cover and food for birds, beasts and insects or not?"

From Co Dublin, an allied protest arrives from another veteran observer of the countryside, Risteard Mulcahy - this time about the fate of young hedgerow trees. Many parts of the Pale counties, he says, "are assuming the bare, treeless aspect which was evident for so long in the UK and Europe". He blames farmers using tractor and flail to slash the hedgerows, beheading the saplings of ash, sycamore and beech in the process.

So much for hoping that we had all this sorted in the provisions of the new Wildlife Act (which bans roadside hedge-cutting after March 1st, except to trim for traffic safety), and in the hedge management advice to farmers. Saying, doing and enforcing seem as far apart as ever.

The first really thorough set of guidelines for managing our hedges and ditches has just appeared in the first issue of Tearmann, Ireland's new journal of agri-environmental research. It condemns the mangling of mature hedges by the flail as "needlessly destructive, ecologically disruptive and . . . visually appalling", and is adamant that cutting should not be done between late February and the end of August, when the bird-breeding season is over.

Apart from much practical detail about caring for and restoring hedges and ditches, authors John Feehan and Catherine Keena make a fascinating story of the history and evolution of our field boundaries. Some of these are massive banks of stone and earth, webbed with the roots of ancient shrubs - "monuments to the hands that claimed and laid out the land, as worthy of our consideration as ringforts and burial mounds". Others have lost any claim to be stock-proof, but earn their place now in a value system that respects their age and place in the landscape and their aesthetic appeal. Some thorn hedges are now mere "relict" lines of gnarled trees, but they have slowly accumulated their full community of animals, birds and insects and associated wildflowers, ferns and lichens.

This is part of the sense of "heritage" that needs to inform a much wider audience than the Teagasc REPS farm planners to whom the Tearmann paper is directed. A local community which reaches for the word "pity" when an old, landmark hedgerow is suddenly torn out seldom seems to realise that what has been lost is part of its heritage.

The first dozen Heritage Officers now appointed to local authorities on the initiative of the Heritage Council have an immediate task of educating people on the place of wildlife and habitat conservation in their brief.

Heritage is more than ruined abbeys, folklore and the language: landscape and nature are the context for all human history.

Planners and developers, too, need to be given a framework within which hedges, trees and locally precious habitats can be assessed for conservation and integration within a changing scene. How much destruction of hedgerows and trees could be avoided simply by setting minimum standards of action? All over the country, hedgerows are being dug out to make room for roadside houses, tearing great gaps in the linear corridors available to wildlife (last year's new rural housing cost some 540 km of natural hedges). How often could developments be set back behind existing hedges - great sound-barriers as these are - and laid out in house-groups with a single road exit? Does every one-off bungalow need to be seen from the road? Irish planners and developers work in a vacuum at levels of conservation more intimate and local than Special Areas of Conservation, Natural Heritage Areas and the rest.

One model to help them could be a ground-breaking new book called Developing Naturally: A Handbook for Incorporating the Natural Environment into Planning and Development.

Written by an experienced British planner, Mike Oxford, with support from English Nature and the Association of Local Government Ecologists, it breaks the complexity of conservation into codes of practice, check-lists and model procedures, and offers ways of incorporating conservation into design and construction processes. Someone please adapt it for Ireland!

Meanwhile, today sees a seminar on hedge-habitat destruction at the weekend Hedge School at Ballyboughal, Co Dublin, funded by the Heritage Council and Fingal County Council. Eanna N∅ Lamhna and Duncan Stewart are among the participants in Ballyboughal Hall at 2 p.m. (For the wider weekend events, including nature walks, see www.thehedge.org).

Developing Naturally, is available at £29.50 stg from Mike Oxford, PO Box 1164, Pensford, Bristol, BS39 4YB

viney@anu.ie.