The assart thread

[AHPP]

Alternatively, I may have just had the conversation with myself because I can't find it anywhere. It could have been in the members only section. <search term> site:arbtalk.co.uk searches don't find those and I still don't have much luck with the searching on the site itself.

[sime42]

8 minutes ago, openspaceman said:

I don't remember the discussion  and had to be reminded of the meaning of assart.

 

I think the picture shows a beech hedge on a boundary bank that was previously laid and managed. The leading shoots have then grown up to form trees that have shaded out suppressed parts of the hedging.

 

I worked on an estate where just this happened, the hedge protected beech coppice (for charcoal making and the hearths could be seen throughout the hillside) from animals traveling along the track (part of the pilgrims way). When we felled some stems they were 90 years of growth dating them to the 1890s.

 

I've seen similar Beech trees, part of out grown laid hedges on top of banks or stone walls, around Exmoor too.

[AHPP]

2 minutes ago, sime42 said:

I agree. Who doesn't enjoy a bit of cork-sniffing? We're getting into the realms of Oliver Rackham now.

It's only cork-sniffing because of the time of man though. I don't think it was long ago that this sort of sense and intuition was much more common. Or perhaps I have an idealised imagination of the past. Maybe people never noticed these things because they were sick of hedges, fields and general toiling and couldn't wait to get home for an ale and to hear about how the spinning jenny is coming along.

[sime42]

Both I reckon. People used to be far more in tune with the natural world around them, but were sick of it after the hours walk home to a cold, dark hovel at the end of a 12 hour working day out in the elements.

 

 

[marktownend]

Indeed, we've had our woodland for just over 2 years and have had my mum and an aunt, both in their early 80s visit and both were spotting all sorts of things I knew nothing about, just because people in general knew more about nature and the countyside even as recently as their childhoods in the 1940s.

 

I thought from the first photo it looked very like a spot near Castle Drogo so was chuffed when I saw the finger post in the 2nd pic pointing towards Castle Drogo. Think I had the wrong spot though.

 

Am I right in saying that an assart hedge is a hedge specifically formed by leaving a thin strip on the edge of a woodland when it was cleared? Think I've read about that in one of my woodland books. Presumably if you're needing a field boundary for stock enclosure or whatever then it would have made sense to leave some existing trees (presumably supplemented with some traditional hedge laying) rather than grubbing the whole lot out and starting from scratch as you'd have a functioning hedge sooner.

[AHPP]

1 hour ago, marktownend said:

Am I right in saying that an assart hedge is a hedge specifically formed by leaving a thin strip on the edge of a woodland when it was cleared? 

Yep

[AHPP]

One problem of knowing about assarting is that you want to find them and start bending reality in your head to do so (like I sort of did in the first post of this thread).

 

Like this one from Maximus Ironthumper's latest video on youtube. Assart hedge or not?