Lynchmere Common - Dead Hedging

Recently we had a bonus work party on the Lynchmere commons when we were joined by the Southampton University Conservation Volunteers.

The weather was kind to our visitors and we were able to work on a couple of tasks that had been waiting for some spare labour.







On the Saturday we worked on Lynchmere to clear scrub from a regenerating heathland area. But rather than burn it we used it to rebuild a nearby dead hedge around an area of Hazel coppice on the edge of the common.

On Sunday we started to clear a fence line on Marley common where we will be grazing jointly with the National Trust.






A dead hedge is a way to build a temporary barrier by reusing the waste material to hand. It forms a less intrusive fence to prevent the cattle from grazing the young hazel shoots.

The coppice here is one of a number of areas (called coups) of hazel coppice we are planting around the edges of the common. It increased the diversity of our site and provides a great habitat for wildlife. It's also good for the woodland flowers as the coppice is cut on a regular cycle.

For this dead hedge we are just piling the cut birch, gorse and pine in a bank between two rows of posts. But we also have longer dead hedges which are based on weaving the brash around a single row of posts.





All too often heathland management seems to be a matter of spraying and mechanised cutting. We don't spray and increasingly we try to minimise the amount of mechanised cutting that we do.

It seems more appropriate to cut the scrub by hand and then reuse it for the hedging, and it results in a much lower carbon footprint provided you don't count the tractor diesel it takes to move it. But then these things are rarely simple choices.





Dead hedging has a number of drawbacks, it's only really useful if you have a lot of spare labour and plenty of waste material, which conservation groups often do. But it has some positive sides as well in that allows the waste material to rot down naturally and provides a great haven in which the wildlife really thrives.

The result of the days work is a sturdy dead hedge and already the wildlife is moving into its newly refurbished home.