The chilly midsummer weather relented sufficiently to make our walk along the hedgerows a pleasant and instructive afternoon stroll To the casual uninformed eye a hedge is just a line of trees and shrubs along the edges of fields and roads, but under Anne’s expert guidance we identified 25 species of shrubs and trees in hedges along the route, and learned a great deal about why and how these boundaries came into being. We also learned that the different levels between fields evolved as a result of centuries of ploughing in one direction.
Walking by fields with little of the world of today intruding, it was easy to imagine oneself back in times past. The Romans knew this part of our world well, and we skirted the site of one of their villas that is still waiting to be uncovered; and before them of course there would have been other inhabitants stretching back deep into pre-history. It was indeed a most enjoyable walk, with vistas opening up through gaps in hedges that I for one had never seen before. And I had a strange sense of deja vu; as though I and the others in the group had indeed been alive throughout the past, and were merely revisiting it. A bit of poetic fancy perhaps, but as Shakespeare said in Hamlet “there are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamed of in your philosophy” [Ken Feakes].