A red-listed Cornish craft you can try for a day at Bosavern, St Just

Some Cornish hedges have stood for more than 3,500 years, which makes them among the oldest human-made structures anywhere still doing the job they were built for, roughly as ancient as the later Egyptian pyramids. The skill to build one has grown rare enough to land on a national red list of endangered crafts. On Saturday 8 August you can spend a day learning it, hands in the soil, at a working community farm on the edge of St Just.

What the day involves

Bosavern Community Farm is running a one-day Cornish hedging taster session from 9am to 4:30pm. It is a practical, hands-on introduction rather than a lecture, guided by an Advanced LANTRA trained tutor who will walk you through the key principles and techniques of building and maintaining a traditional Cornish hedge.

A Cornish hedge is not the leafy row of shrubs the word suggests elsewhere in the country. It is two independent stone walls built either side of an earth and “rab” core, raised to a concave “batter” so the faces lean inward as they climb, which is what sets it apart from an ordinary dry-stone wall. The biggest stones, the “grounders”, sit at the base, and the top is finished with upright or diagonal courses in patterns that carry names like “Jack and Jill” and “Cow and Calf”. The style shifts with the local stone, which is why hedges here in West Penwith look noticeably different from those up around Delabole. Learning to lay one properly takes patience and a good eye, which is what a full day on site is for.

A craft worth saving

There are around 30,000 miles of Cornish hedge across the county, Cornwall’s largest semi-natural habitat and, by some reckonings, its greatest single landscape asset. More than 500 native plant species grow on them, and they form sheltered corridors for adders, harvest mice and bats moving through the farmland. Since 1995 Cornwall has lost more than 150 miles of hedge, and the Cornwall National Landscape has recorded how the craft to maintain the rest has been slipping away. The Heritage Crafts red-listing is the formal marker of how close it has come to being lost.

The bigger effort to keep the skill alive

The workshop is part of a wider push to stop that happening. The Cornwall Rural Education and Skills Trust (CREST) is delivering Cornish hedging LANTRA courses at Bosavern and other local sites, and was set up specifically to address the shortage of training in the craft and to raise awareness of what hedges are worth in the landscape.

CREST has secured funding from the Cornwall AONB Farming in Protected Landscapes Programme to work in partnership with The Cornwall Heritage Trust on a Cornish hedging training and education programme. Details of the full run of sessions are on the CREST workshops and events page.

To register an interest in the wider programme, you can email [email protected] with your name, address, date of birth and a note of which courses suit you best. Some full bursaries are available.

Booking the Bosavern taster

The taster day is £100 per person, camping options are available if you want to make a weekend of it, and the farm has said spaces are still available. Bookings and questions go to [email protected], and full details are on the farm’s Cornish hedging page. Some of these hedges have stood so long they hold querns, cup-marked stones and even early Christian crosses built into their faces, quiet records of the people who raised them.