7. Hedges: From Barriers to Thresholds
“Hedgerows are an extensive and valuable part of our heritage. They have a utility in the present but also mark the past. Their values are multi-functional in both practical and spiritual terms. They enrich our history, landscape, ecology, rural society and farming practices…creating a sense of place.” – Foulkes 2007
History and Function of Irish Hedges
There is archaeological evidence of hedges on the island now known as Ireland dating back to the Bronze Age,[1] though Neolithic communities may have also utilised them to control cattle on common land.[2] These early structures can be identified by their irregular shapes and diversity of species. Beyond livestock control, hedges function as wind and snow-breaks, which shelter animals and crops and preserve precious topsoil. The root systems and associated banks aid in hydrology, the retention and movement of water.[3] This sponge-like bulwark reduces the need for irrigation and inhibits the eutrophication[4] of adjacent waters by sustaining nutrients. The plants also remove harmful CO2 from the air and thwart the proliferation of airborne diseases between livestock.[5] Professional hedge-layer, Neil Foulkes emphasises the role of hedges as surrogate habitats and “’arteries’ for the movement of wildlife through the land.”[6] The borders provide a home for the predators of crop-destroying insects, including two-thirds of indigenous or migrating songbirds.[7] Hedges are an “integral part of the Irish landscape history,” but their social context has been as fluid and conflicting as the Blackthorn that frequently inhabits them.[8] The Normans brought the concept of private property to the island with a feudal system that was continued and expanded by the colonising British and the fastest rate of land enclosure took place from the late 18th to early 19th centuries. The resulting rectangular plots epitomise the rural Irish landscape in popular imagination, even as the number of heritage hedges has steadily declined over the last few decades.[9]
Hedges as liminal spaces
The creation and maintenance of these living walls is a collaboration between humans and the landscape over a long span. Although regional methods of Irish hedge-laying have been lost to time, the early techniques were likely derived from observations of natural processes resulting from ecological or human damage to young trees. In general, saplings would be planted[10] in a row and then severed diagonally until they are cut almost through and can be bent down to re-root into the earth. Paradoxically, this damage encourages vertical growth, increasing the height of the hedging. Vertical supports and bindings can be added to support the structure as it fills in with volunteer plants, such as Blackthorn, which weave through to create wattle.[11][12] As this active barrier bridges agricultural land with the surrounding landscape, it becomes a “haven for plants fleeing the stomach of cattle and the plow.”[13] Through inosculation, interwoven branches eventually rub together enough to expose their cambium[14] and grow together, blending into a single entity.[15] As sites of negotiation, resulting from colonisation and human disturbance, these twisted and blurred structures shift from dichotomous barriers to thresholds of shifting narratives, holding “different values for different people” and entities.[16]
In vs out
“A field is a structured social space, a field of forces, a force field. It contains people who dominate and people who are dominated. Constant, permanent relationships of inequality operate inside this space, which at the same time becomes a space in which various actors struggle for the transformation or preservation of the field.” – Bourdieu (Burns 2020, 5)
The previous folk medicine chapter outlined conflicting characteristics of protection and danger inherent or imbued in Blackthorn. This contradiction is mirrored by the concept of in vs out, as hedges become sites of storytelling, memory and identity formation and land/resource accessibility. As marginal spaces, hedges interact with Otherworld entities, which inform societal values through narrative and belief. Communities cooperate with hedges and the plants within them as they navigate relationship to place and resistance to forces, which threaten environmental and cultural ecology.
Land dispossession, Whiteboys & Gender Play
“As the English colonised the worlds that were new to them, they…also introduced…the notion that land could be owned by individuals. In order to announce this appropriation, they grew hedges to mark the boundary between private property and common land, both of which were no longer available to the original inhabitants” (Vaughn 2015, 60).
Although they had been in vernacular use before the arrival of the British, hedges became a symbol of oppression and dispossession of family farms and commonage across the Empire. After implementing a salt tax in India, the East India Company constructed 2500 miles of living barrier to control transport and prevent tax avoidance[17]. The towering structure prevented freedom of movement and made the nutritive mineral inaccessible to the struggling population.[18] Land dispossession and sectionalisation continued across Ireland through the 18th and 19th centuries, culminating with the Enclosure Acts passed between 1845-1882, which were explicitly executed to “keep peasants out of what was previously common land.”[19] Rejection of colonial partitioning, land appropriation and tithe extraction led to rebellion by secret Irish agrarian societies, including the Buachallí Bána or Whiteboys[20]. Also known as the “Levellers,” these oath-bound dissenters frequently tore down fences, walls, ditches and hedges. Their “grievance on the score of enclosures was linked primarily to the encroachment of dairy and beef cattle on commonage,” which was regularly used for the tillage of potatoes.[21] Increased demand for meat and dairy products in England was driven by the Seven Years’ War and landlords began reclaiming common lands that were once included with tenant plots. Meanwhile, extravagant deer parks, gardens and orchards were maintained by the upper classes and prices for necessities were rising.[22]
The Buachallí Bána challenged landlords and their agents through intimidation, violence and carnivalesque behaviour. Acting in large groups, wearing long white smocks over their clothes and referring to themselves as sidhe, the Whiteboys curated an Otherworldly atmosphere as a stage for their class warfare. They claimed themselves the children of Queen Sive/Sadhbh[23] and made their oaths to her, bonding them to the land and their human and more-than-human ancestors.[24] Dressing in Otherworld drag and employing menacing symbols, like gallows, graves and coffins, they created an “air of festivity” with bonfires, music and ceremony, including a surrogate trial and execution of an offending magistrate’s horse.[25] Their large numbers, threatening letters and violent actions gave them the power to free jailed debtors and demand lower tithes and their levelling of the wall around the Rock of Cashel was particularly emblematic. This historical site was inhabited from the Iron Age to the Middle Ages and was the seat of the King of Munster. A collective action by multiple Whiteboy parishes brought down the partition, which divided the Irish from this sacred site of ancestral power.[26] From 1695 to the Militia Act of 1793, Catholics were unable to serve in the army or hold firearms. Although stolen guns were sometimes used by Whiteboys, they also employed farm implements and blackthorn sticks, which were readily available in the hedges barring them from commonage.[27] These more-than-human ancestral weapons convey the danger of the Otherworld and the resilience of the land against the British oppressors and their lackeys. From a wholly practical standpoint, the group’s white costumes made them visible in the dark and less susceptible to friendly fire; however, through a contemporary lens, the dress and fairy associations of the Buachallí Bána can be embraced as a queering or gender play and a subversion, which allowed for the performance of anti-social behaviour in the interest of resistance and community preservation.
Governmental attempts at repressing the initial Whiteboy movement were largely ineffective due to loyalty, secrecy and support from the larger community, including craftsmen who interacted frequently with farmers. The struggle was eventually quashed by a series of poor harvests and a return to hunger and dis-ease, which resulted in shifting priorities; however, later insurgences were inspired by these early efforts and hedges continued to be sites of opposing histories.[28] An ethnographic account from County Leitrim describes land that was “divided in a very queer way” with “co-meadows” that compelled trespass disputes, ending in court cases.[29] The narrative also mentions frequent evictions and the murder of a particularly merciless landlord, Lord Leitrim, who was ambushed by a group of men secreted behind a hedge.[30] The man’s reputation for cruelty led to rioting at his funeral.[31]
Rites of Passage and Community Cohesion
In reaction to dispossession and disempowerment, communities interacted with hedges for concealment and disallowed rites of passage, such as education. Hedge-schools were so called due to their clandestine locations in barns or behind hedges, bringing the students in frequent contact with Blackthorn and emphasising the plant’s protective nature. In County Kerry, students made ink from Blackthorn sloes at a school under two bushes and in County Longford, a surreptitious school was sheltered by a thorny Blackthorn hedge.[32] The following chapter will delve into these defiant sites of intergenerational knowledge transmission in relation to blackthorn shillelagh construction, fight training and resistance. Passage into death is sometimes facilitated by hedges surrounding cemeteries and cillíní. In recent years, Neil Foulkes was commissioned to construct a hedge around a famine graveyard (Vaughn 2015). For those who perished during An Gorta Mór, a living wall of thorny sustenance is a suitable memorial shroud.
Native (Indigenous) vs Colonial and On Island vs Diaspora
Blackthorn is considered indigenous to the island now known as Ireland and although human interactions with the plant can be traced to at least the Iron Age, there is no story of the initial appearance of Blackthorn in the landscape; however, because they thrive in areas of disturbance[33], it is possible that Blackthorn arrived with the advent of man or other large animals. When Blackthorn and other wattle plants, like Bramble, enter hedges spontaneously, they are sometimes described as “freely-colonising.”[34] Whether these plants are present due to “deliberate planting or natural recruitment[35],” their contribution tells a story about right relationship and naturalisation, which can inform members of the English diaspora, whose ancestors colonised Éire and members of the Irish diaspora, who were forced to emigrate in response to occupation and enforced starvation, but in turn, became complicit in new projects of colonisation.[36]
Tradition, Knowledge bearers and Gendered Knowledge
Population loss, construction and shifts from small farm-holders to commercial farming have contributed to the loss of traditional hedges across the island, but the remaining structures preserve generational knowledge of place, if not construction. In an effort to revive the craft and weave new stories in connection with the land, modern hedge-layers are restoring forgotten hedges and have developed Irish Free Style, using stakes and binders to support new hedgerows.[37]
A contemporary study of farmers’ attitudes toward tidy farming practices through the Bourdieusian lenses of habitus, field and capital demonstrates the tension of inclusion vs exclusion in the recognition of “good farmer” identity formation. Ireland’s multigenerational legacy of colonial policing perpetuates a patriarchal domination of farming practices and a culturally embedded scramble for symbolic capital through the performance of pride and tidiness as perceived by others.[38] These practices, including hedge maintenance, “have a deep, value-laden symbolism that is understood and recognised amongst the farming community…and the value attached to them [is] largely transferred to farmers by farmers inter-generationally,” contributing to self-realisation and societal expectations.[39] The structurally supported patrilineal inheritance of land in Ireland has reinforced male-dominated agriculture and erased the value of women’s work while encouraging community surveillance by “looking over hedges” to appraise the appearance of neighbouring farms.[40] The study showed that male farmers “aim to maintain the recurring image of a cultural landscape shaped by their own work as well as by their ancestors,” while women, who historically oversaw dairy production at the heart of the farm, feel less need to perform domination of the landscape or regulate community farming standards.[41] The report is limited by binary gender markers, but reflective of rural, early Irish societal norms that have endured. As more women violate the gendered cosmology of ancestral farming roles by extending their purview to the periphery of the tended land,[42] they challenge models of regulating community behaviour by transforming hedges and other barriers from lenses of surveillance to gateways for new priorities. Labyrinthine hedgerows and the marginal areas they enfold become scenes of reconciliation and accountability for diverging identities and complex inheritances.
These negotiations can also be examined on an individual level through relationships with Blackthorn. The following chapter will weave autoethnography[43] with historical scholarship and archival accounts to explore Blackthorn as material culture. My personal intro to Blackthorn was through herbalism with a particular emphasis on heart protection through sympathetic thorn medicine. Blackthorn, Hawthorn, Rose and other thorny allies offer phytochemical cardioprotective functions, while energetically providing a semipermeable boundary around the heart, that allows for softening and openness in combination with defence against harsh inner and outer environments. In the face of internal and external struggles, I was enamoured with the sanctuary of a thorny heart-hedge that did not prevent human and more-than-human connection. A few years later, I began deeply interrogating my role as a member of Irish and greater European diaspora, living on colonised land in the United States. Although most of this self-reflection involves an ongoing attempt to live in right relationship with Turtle Island and its original stewards, I also began connecting more with the lands of my ancestors through story. A few months before I travelled to Dublin to study Folklore and Ethnology at UCD, I was pleased to discover a local teacher of Irish stick fighting, with whom I could study even after moving abroad. It was through this practice that I developed a more complex relationship with Blackthorn, in the form of a shillelagh.
[1] O’Brien 2009; Vaughn 2015
[2] Cooney 1991
[3] Condon and Jarvis 1989; Foulkes 2007; McCourt and Kelly 2007; Vaughn 2015;
[4] Excessive nutrient content, due to agricultural runoff (Oxford)
[5] Condon and Jarvis 1989; Foulkes 2007; McCourt and Kelly 2007; Vaughn 2015
[6] 2007, 23
[7] McCourt and Kelly 2007
[8] McCourt and Kelly 2007, 1
[9] Condon and Jarvis 1989; Foulkes 2007
[10] Or found
[11] Interlacing material for fences/barriers
[12] Vaughn 2015
[13] Vaughn 2015, 48
[14] Layer of growth cells
[15] Vaughn 2015
[16] Foulkes 2007, 22
[17] Between 1804 and 1876
[18] Vaughn 2015
[19] Vaughn 2015, 64
[20] Initially active from 1761-1765 with intermittent uprisings until 1845 (Donnelly 1978; Roberts 1983)
[21] Donnelly 1978, 32
[22] Donnelly 1978
[23] Mother of Oisin by Fionn Mac Cumhaill and a personification of the land/Otherworld/common ancestors in the form maiden or crone (Donnelly 1978).
[24] Donnelly 1978
[25] Donnelly 1978, 24
[26] Donnelly 1978; Rock of Cashel
[27] Dean Jr 2015
[28] Donnelly 1978
[29] NFC S 214: 208
[30] NFC S 214: 208
[31] National Endowment 1878
[32] NFC S 230: 289-291; NFC S 405: 625-626; NFC S 757: 288
[33] Animal or human
[34] Condon and Jarvis 1989, 13
[35] volunteering
[36] McCourt and Kelly 2007, 3
[37] Vaughn 2015
[38] Burns 2020
[39] Burns 2020, 4
[40] Burns 2020, 17
[41] Burns 2020, 8
[42] Glassie 1982
[43] Qualitative observation of the author’s lived experience. These sections will be written in first person.
Bridging Appalachia 
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