Even from the car, we can appreciate their beauty as we pass. The glowing autumn colours and the bright bounty of fruits and berries bring delight to the day. However, I’m not content with passing them by, even at a dawdling 20mph with the window down to appreciate the scent of autumn. I’m off out on foot to see what’s around.

Hedges are a wonderful habitat, but often sadly neglected and disregarded, or over-zealously flailed by machine leaving battered remnants and bits all over the road. A properly managed hedge, on the other hand, will last for centuries and provide a stock-proof barrier, a highly varied ‘edge’ habitat and a vital corridor for wildlife. I’m thinking about tall, wide hedges with good thick bases from having been properly laid, frequent fully grown trees emerging from their tops, and a wealth of different woody species – hawthorn, blackthorn, dog rose, field maple, dogwood, hazel, elder and holly are all common in the hedges where I live, with oak, ash and fruit trees growing along them. Ivy scrambles though them, along with brambles, honeysuckle and bryony with its traffic-light berries ripening from green through yellow to bright red. Dunnocks scuffle through the base of the hedge, wrens pick tiny spiders from amongst the thorns and a robin is still singing from a wayward branch sticking out of the hedge top. Shrews bicker around the roots, voles fidget in the gradually dying grasses and a gap shows where a badger squeezes through on his regular patrol, beating the bounds of his clan’s territory and marking them with latrine pits by the bottom of the hedge. Where the leaves have already fallen, a bird’s nest is exposed as a dark clot among the branches, but the hedge is no longer a nursery – now it’s a larder.

This year the hedges are laden with dark red hawthorn berries. The old country lore would say this is a sure sign of a cold winter to come, but there is little evidence to support the idea. The real influence is the weather in the year gone by – a warm dry spring while the hedge is in flower followed by a wet July and August to swell the fruit. If it should happen to be a snowy winter though, the hedgerow fruit will be lifeline for hungry birds. Redwings and fieldfares flock from Scandinavia to feast on them, joining our native thrushes and blackbirds. Mistle thrushes will guard a particularly fruitful tree or patch of hedge, quite aggressive in their defense of their stocks. I’ve actually been walloped by the wing of one chasing me off! They don’t get it all their own way though – another close encounter of the bird kind was when the thrush narrowly missed me as it shot over the hedge, closely pursued by a female sparrowhawk, which swiped me in passing,

To an extent, that thrush was right to be defensive – I’m after a share of the larder too. Tradition has it that sloes should be picked after the first frost, which somewhat sweetens them (though not by much!). Waiting for a frost, though, can mean missing the crop, so I’m going to be harvesting a few and putting them in the freezer overnight, which should do the same job. A bottle of sloe gin and a few jars of sloe and apple jelly will be a grand addition to the winter stores, and bring a little taste of the wild to the table through the cold season. Hawthorn jelly is another tasty treat and a natural accompaniment to cheese or roast meats – there are plenty this year for the birds to spare me a few! Rosehips too remain edible well into the winter months.

Since 1950 we have lost some 300,000 miles of hedgerow in Britain – that’s more than enough to stretch to the moon. However, a lot still remains, so it’s maybe time to get out there and appreciate what we still have, and the efforts that are being made to improve and increase it. There’s around 435,000 miles of hedge still in existence, around 40% of which is thought to be ancient and/or species-rich. Plenty for a good day’s exploration!

If you’ve enjoyed discovering your local hedges, and want to find out more, I can recommend John Wright’s book A Natural History of the Hedgerow (2016) as a really good and informative read.