TUESDAY 21 JULY 1998

MR PAUL WEBLEY, DR BRIAN JONES, MISS VALERIE GREAVES and MR J J WILSON

  123.  May I ask the Dry Stone Walling Association and the National Hedge-laying Society if you would come to the front, please. May I welcome the four of you and ask you to introduce yourselves. I realise that walls and hedges are totally different but may I ask particularly that if you agree with what each of you is saying, please do not repeat it. However, if you disagree, please tell us very quickly that you disagree with the answers somebody else has given. Perhaps I can ask the National Hedge-laying Society to identify yourselves first and then ask the Stone Walling Association.
  (Mr Wilson)  Valerie Greaves on my right is a founder member and Vice President of the National Hedge-laying Society. When she started she was publicity officer as well. She was born on a farm, bred on a farm, and ran the farm when she was only 15. She belonged to the local Young Farmers' Club and was a committee member. She has been on farms in the country where she grew up. The National Hedge-laying Society was started with a group of people wanting to encourage the management of hedges by laying to maintain a high standard of work and encourage young people. They also ran a national competition which was about 100, or just over 100 competitors, and next year is down the road in Clitheroe. Myself, I started with 12 years working on farms. I went to college, came out, and decided that I needed a change of career. I got a national certificate in education, started in the Yorkshire Wolds and was at Bishop Burton College for 12 years. This was followed by four years in Cheshire and ten years as principal down in the East Sussex College. So one way or another, I have had practical farming and agricultural education. Since retirement I have been able to spend a lot of time hedge-laying and have been a founder member and President of the South of England Hedge-laying Society. There are many different styles of hedge-laying in different parts of the country.
  (Mr Webley)  I am Paul Webley. I am the national Chairman of the Dry Stone Walling Association. I am a Dry Stone Walling Association master craftsman involved in judging dry stone walling competitions and training youngsters. My professional background: I am a teacher. I teach rural crafts. I have been doing so since 1962. I have experience of walling in both the south of England and latterly halfway up in the Pennines. I still keep my hand in, although it is not my full-time job.
  (Dr Jones)  Brian Jones, Chairman of the Cumbrian Dry Stone Walling Association, member of the National Management Committee. I help the National Dry Stone Walling Association with various aspects of the working of the grant schemes, planning aspects, legislation aspects, surveys of walls, and things like that.

Chairman:  Thank you very much. Louise Ellman.

  124.  Could you give us some examples of the wildlife, the historical, and the archaeological value of the dry stone walls and hedgerows.
  (Dr Jones)  You have probably seen a lot of the landscape side of it, which I think is very important. Historical: again, I am sure on your visits you have been told about the walls and the old villages and the wider aspects. I think they are a very good part of the cultural history. One of the aspects that perhaps ought to be added is the local distinctiveness of walls. This may be something that comes with more specialised knowledge of walls, different styles. In the way that there are different styles of hedges, there are different styles of walls. Again, there is this very local distinctiveness which are important words these days. On the natural history side, I think the natural history side of dry stone walls has been severely neglected. It is very easy to think of the natural history side of hedges because they are living things; but, in fact, walls are very important, especially in their context in windswept areas—perhaps not quite so much in the lower Dales—but in the higher country, in the high uplands, most of the walls provide protection in the same way as a hedge does. There are all sorts of plants in the bottom of the wall, all sorts of things living in the wall, and there are also things living on both those plants and the insects, certain small animals, so they form an important part of the food chain and help the food chain in the upland areas. I think this is neglected because this is not so obvious.

  125.  Do you want to add something from the hedgerow point of view?
  (Miss Greaves)  Yes. Hedges were put in artificially. They were never natural. They were made by man, and wildlife adapted them and decided they were their homes. Not only myself but various other authorities—I can give you a list of them, if you like, afterwards—have said that they are not essential to wildlife, and many parts of the world do not have hedges like ours. If the hedge is doing its job as a hedge, then by all means let it be used to conserve wildlife—an excellent idea—as long as it keeps its dual role and is not kept purely for or as a zoo.

  126.  I would like to turn to the question of information and the recording of information. Do you have any comments on the information recorded on the neglect or dereliction of boundaries from what your knowledge might be, what local surveys might show, and what national maps might show? Are there any information sheets?
  (Dr Jones)  The very simple answer is that really there is insufficient information. We rely on the Countryside Commission surveys which have been sample surveys, especially in the National Parks, and concentrated there. We have done a few local surveys but information is really very poor. We cannot even draw a line on the map and say, "Within the country this area has dry stone walls." We have started this exercise but it is not complete.
  (Mr Webley)  The most comprehensive survey, which has been done of late, is the ADAS survey. This was carried out for the Countryside Commission, to which we drew your attention in our memorandum. That was a survey in which I was closely involved, in that I trained the surveyors and helped set up some of the types or depths of dereliction of the various walls which were actually worked on. There has been nothing really, as far as walls are concerned, in terms of comparison, yet we were somewhat surprised that this full survey did not come into the public domain. A synopsis went out that there was a huge amount of information actually involved in that.

  127.  Are you satisfied that enough information is recorded and accessible?
  (Mr Webley)  No.
  (Dr Jones)  We have made attempts to try and persuade various authorities to bring this together in modern techniques and to add more. It is possible now with geographical information systems to do a lot more to interpolate between data and stuff like this. So there is a lot of scope there but a big lack.

  128.  Who would be responsible for doing that?
  (Dr Jones)  There is a problem that the Countryside Commission has had a go. They are the main lead but they have had ADAS as their agent to do it. I would have thought that one of those organisations normally on a contractual basis—— It may be the university, I do not know.

  129.  Do you think anybody does has a clear responsibility for doing that? Is that a problem?
  (Dr Jones)  I think there is a problem between the Countryside Commission on the countryside and the fact that it is agricultural. There is a strong agricultural element. There is a problem there, between two stools.
  (Mr Webley)  The collation and deliverance of this actually falls between a whole series of agencies. I am not at all sure that there is a real consultation between those agencies actually to produce something which really covers the whole field.

  130.  If the information is difficult on the walling side, it is even worse, is it not, on the hedgerow side?
  (Mr Wilson)  The big difficulty really is what is a neglected hedge? That has got to be defined to start with.

  131.  How would you define it?
  (Mr Wilson)  The obvious one is this. (indicating)
  (Miss Greaves)  Look at that. (indicating)  

  132.  That is a very graphic feature.
  (Miss Greaves)  That is neglected but unfortunately the figures of the survey say it is a lost hedge. It has been added to the numbers that have been removed but it can be restored. There are similar hedges having been restored beside it. Would you like to have it?

Chairman:  Yes. (same handed)

  133.  What would you say is the bigger problem, removal or dereliction?
  (Mr Wilson)  Dereliction by a long, long way, yes. There is so much talk of removal which is not exactly removal, it has just gone very gappy, (using a country term). It then becomes "gone" and is classified as being removed but it has not been removed, it can still be laid and regenerated—either laid or coppiced—in which case you get regeneration from the bottom.
  (Miss Greaves)  A lot of loss is unrecorded and it is real loss. If you get planning permission for an estate, a supermarket, a new recreation place, this overrides any need to notify the council that the hedge has been removed. It has been removed and nobody takes any notice of it at all. As much goes that way as by any farmer removing any, or any dereliction.

  134.  Is this a major problem?
  (Miss Greaves)  It is a problem because people take these figures and say that these are the thousands of hedges lost when, in fact, ones that are lost, really lost, are more from urban development than from farming.

  135.  Do we know how much is lost there that way?
  (Miss Greaves)  You do not because you do not record it. The planning permission overrides any need to record it as a hedge removed.

  136.  If I can ask the same question as I asked before, is it the responsibility of any particular authority to record that?
  (Miss Greaves)  A lot of authorities do some recording, including the Ministry and so forth. They have a nice little habit of taking a number of villages—not a lot—or a number of areas. They take the figures from there and then do a bit of multiplication and say, "That is the number for the country." I have been looking this up so this is how I know.

  137.  But you do not think there is any systematic responsibility for recording it?
  (Miss Greaves)  I do not think there really is, not for the whole lot. You get a lot of people who say, "We want hedges. We must not have them removed." They go round the country looking at hedges, like the one I have shown you, and counting them as lost. They will hand them into a ministry or any other authority saying, "This is lost," when it is not. They do not know. They have come from a town. They see a hedge which looks like half a dozen small hedges. They say, "It has gone." I have actually seen a programme on television which showed them saying a hedge was gone, which was a far better one than the one I have shown on that picture. All this is counted as lost and it is not.
  (Mr Wilson)  In 1993 a body known as the Institute of Terrestrial Ecology—I have never heard of that—quoted: "Hedge planting is outstripping removal." The second quote: "The main problem is one of declining regular maintenance." I have never met up with the Terrestrial Ecology.

  138.  Would you agree with their view that the main problem is now a lack of maintenance rather than removal?
  (Mr Wilson)  Yes.
  (Mr Webley)  We see dereliction as being the major problem, outside the National Park areas particularly, where farming incomes have actually dropped to extremely low. Dereliction is caused usually by a lack of maintenance. They say that one stitch in time saves nine. When you do not maintain a wall, keeping the toppings on it, it can be an extremely costly affair to renew it completely. Regular maintenance would stop a lot of this problem.
  (Dr Jones)  I also agree that there is a problem with development; loss of walls during development. One needs to have more planning guidance and things like that when development occurs at the edge of a village, as we have done here, where walls of a similar type should be incorporated into the development.

  139.  Thank you. I would like now to turn to the question of cost: the relative costs of rebuilding, replacing dry stone walls with the cost of fencing with wire and posts. Do you have any views on that?
  (Mr Wilson)  If you put up a wire fence, say with netting at the bottom with two strands of barbed wire, we are talking about £4 a metre. That will last probably ten years and then its stakes will rot off at ground level unless there is maintenance during that ten years. So to have a ten years' life of perfection there will have to be maintenance as well. Hedge-laying, depending on hedge and availability of the stakes and binders, as we call them, which is the bit we put over the top, is somewhere between £7.50 and £8 a metre; so it is double what a barbed wire netting fence would be. But you are talking of a life of 40 or 50 years for a laid hedge, as opposed to ten years for a stake and barbed wire fence; and you have a dual purpose object. You have a shelter from the wind, like a wall, if it is a good thick hedge. You do not get much shelter from two strands of barbed wire.