The beginning of 2024 also saw me involved in training courses and competitions, as well as travelling to Holland for hedgelaying. As usual, we had the South of England Hedgelaying Championships, this year on the Angmering Park Estate where I was competing in the Champion’s Class. It was my first competition since being treated for Lymphoma, and also my first in a year. Whilst I didn’t ‘set the World on fire’, I held my own and gave a good account of myself. It was also good to be back at a reasonable level of fitness.

A week after the South of England competition should have been the Isle of Wight competition, at which I was the reigning champion. However, the organisers unfortunately had to cancel the event at short notice, but at least I got to keep the title for another year!

Shortly after the competition, I was invited to run a training course in hedgelaying for some of the Cowdray Estate staff who were keen to gain NHLS / Lantra accreditation at Bronze Level. Accordingly, I went in a few days earlier to lay a short section of hedge as a demonstration piece.

The course ran across three days and was quite intense as none of the guys had done any hedgelaying before. However, they were all keen and got stuck in straight away.

By the end of the third day they had all done a very respectable job on their respective sections of hedge. However, there was still plenty of hedge for them to go at for the all important practice needed to become proficient hedgelayers.

At the beginning of March, I was invited to the Netherlands for a long weekend along with three other cutters from the South of England Hedgelaying Society. We were asked to run an improvers workshop on one day, and then to do some demonstration hedges at one of their annual competitions at Boxmeer, near the border with Germany.

The hedge for the workshop was located on private farmland and was situated in a beautiful location curving gently round a pond. I was paired with Ilse who was already a very proficient hedgelayer and we soon had our section down.

The landowner didn’t want any binding on top of the hedge, so we opted for a dense, double brush with stakes placed on alternate sides of the hedge, something along the lines of Lancashire and Westmorland style.

The following day we were at the competition in Boxmeer and working on our demonstration hedges. There were also hedgelayers from Ireland, France and Belgium demonstrating on site. I was working on a South of England hedge, which was a good size and was fun to do using only hand tools (no chainsaws).

However, the style of hedgelaying in the Boxmeer area is very unique. Called Maasheggen, the style is more akin to hedge weaving. They remove almost all the brush (small woody growth) to leave a very open structure. The reason for this becomes apparent when you see that the area is very close to the River Maas, which floods quite regularly – sometimes several metres. The open structure allows the flood water to pass through without doing too much damage, whereas a dense hedge with stakes and binders could well be swept away.

There were over 40 teams competing in the championships and for us ‘outsiders’ it was difficult to spot the winner. There were also hundreds of spectators, easily as many if not more than we get at our National Championships.

We ended the weekend with a wonderful meal in a local hostelry surrounded by our fellow hedgelayers, many of whom have become great friends since. It’s what makes hedgelaying so special, the camaraderie between us regardless of where we are from, and all passionate about our craft and what it brings to wildlife and the landscape.