Battling alone with prickly thorny bushes as well as the elements may not be everybody’s cup of tea but it is precisely what Pete Currill has spent the last month doing at Thorndale Farm.  Pete is currently finishing laying the hedge which runs down the drive and anyone who has visited Thorndale in recent weeks must agree he has created a masterpiece of rural craftsmanship.

This is the first piece of work that Pete has done on Mark Vestey’s estate and he is without doubt a man who takes huge pride in his work and is a real master of his trade which requires painstaking skill and patience.  His passion is obvious and he readily confesses to spending most of his time when he is driving around looking at different hedges and wondering who has done what and why. 

The quality of laying hedges depends very much on the age of the hedge, the type of wood it contains and whether it has been cut before.  As for this job, Pete says “This hedge is 10 to 12 years old which is just about right for laying and as it contains mostly thorn it’s meant I’ve been able to do a pretty good job.  It has been cut though which does mean the branches become pretty tangled which slows you down.  There are also patches of nut and hedge maple which are more difficult to deal with but overall I’m pretty pleased.  I get a great sense of achievement when I’ve made a nice job of it.” 

There is certainly a knack in order to create the best effect.  It doesn’t always happen.  Pete mentioned one job he’d done where the hedge had been quite rough, “I made a mess of it and plus it was right next to a road so I was pretty embarrassed.  You look at this hedge and you wouldn’t believe the same person had done the two hedges!”.   Pete obviously sets his standards pretty high though and he definitely appears to be his own harshest critic!

The hedge at Thorndale has been laid in the ‘Midlands style’ which essentially is designed to keep livestock in by keeping one side bushy and thorny to repel the animals whilst the other side remains as flat as possible.  A key skill is to ensure that the stem of each branch is cut just the right amount. 

As Pete explains, “If the stem kinks too much, it won’t stay alive.  The key is to make sure the stem bends in a smooth curve.  That way new shoots will grow and in twelve months time the hedge will be really nice and thick enough to keep in sheep.”

He learnt his trade twenty years ago under the tutelage of Robin Dale, well known on the hedge laying competition circuit but it was 4 or 5 years before Pete felt brave enough to lay a hedge on his own for someone else, “It’s different when they’re paying, you’ve got to make a good job of it.”

Asked whether he himself takes part in these celebrated country competitions, Pete is rather shy, “I don’t like people watching me whilst I work.  I would rather stop and talk to them!  It’s probably why I work best on my own.  I enjoy it, I have plenty of time to think and can do it in my own time.”  Of course this inevitably means it takes longer, “People say that you can do a chain (22 yards) a day but I find that quite difficult.”  This could be to do with the fact that Pete is clearly a perfectionist.

In many rural areas, there just isn’t the enthusiasm to keep the hedge laying tradition alive but certainly in this part of the Cotswolds it is flourishing.  Pete is based in the village of Cold Aston about 8 miles from us and says that this job is about as far away as he needs to come. 

With two more hedges already in his sights on the Farm here, we are likely to be seeing a good deal more of Pete over the coming weeks.  It will be a pleasure watching him apply his trade, even though as he insists, “We need to ignore the knobbly bits!”.