Hedgelaying and Planting

The course will provide a sound introduction to the ancient craft of hedge laying. Perfect for those who wish to acquire or improve on skills for creating and/or maintaining hedges.

Choose between two stand-alone dates: Sunday 19 January OR Sunday 2 February 2025.

The focus is on a wild, living hedge with conservation and biodiversity at heart. Learn the old craft and be close to nature as you work with traditional hand tools. This is also great for human wellbeing.

Learn the theory and tradition, and explore the environmental benefits. Learn and develop your skills in branch clearing, coppicing, pleaching, laying and also dead hedging and planting new trees to gap up and invigorate a hedge to make it younger and fresher. Hedgerows provide a variety of species with shelter and food and offer linear corridors often linking other habitats and they are so important, but often modern management with machinery neglects the hedges and doesn’t allow for this rejuvenation.

This course is part of Skills for All at Berrington Hall, a successfully crowdfunded project to empower, upskill and connect people in practical skills for sustainable living. Thanks to individual supporters and the Shropshire Council Shared Prosperity Community Fund, we are able to offer these places for free to people who live, work or study in Shropshire, particularly 18-25's and members of community groups.

We want to make sure that as many people as possible have this opportunity and that the course is 100% full on the day, so please We want to make sure that as many people as possible have this opportunity and that the course is 100% full on the day, so please only book a place if you can definitely attend, and if something changes for you it's really important that you let us know so that we can offer your place to someone else.

I am a ‘Shropshire lad’, a county lad too, have been born and lived and worked all my life in the Shropshire countryside, born on a farm into farming parents, with my father being brought up in the late 1930s -1940s he learnt many skills that were necessary then but would be considered traditional now. He passed many of these on to me. I like to teach others in nature connection, wildlife tracking understanding and reading the countryside and traditional countryside skills, many of which we seem to lose. I work with wildlife and nature and creating and restoring habitats is something that will become important even more in the future if we are to try and reverse the climate crisis and rewild.

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