I have a regular walk, and an extension to that walk if I am in the right mood. I have to be in the right mood to do the extension because it is uphill all the way and it is steep. That is also why it is a holloway. Today was a beautiful but cold day so I went for it. So did the farmer.
My usual walk starts at sea level and rises to 131 feet in one and a half miles, while the extension rises to 334 feet above sea level. That's an extra 200 feet high in only an added half mile. You see why I need to be in the right mood.
This is near the top of the hill and the hedges are being trimmed by the farmer. Trimming hedges along a public thoroughfare is the legal requirement of the landowner. We have hundreds of generations of farmers to thank for this manicured, classic English view.
In days gone by, jobs like this were all done by hand, I would guess using scythes and other such tools. Today of course the farmer uses a tractor with an extended cutting blade on a mechanical arm, and there is the farmer driving along on the original land surface a good twelve feet above the road. This isn't even the deepest part of the holloway.
This is the vertical edge of the holloway, and it is fragile stuff. Occasionally I am sure, a tractor or an Amazon van squeezing past another tractor or Amazon van knocks another piece of this fragile slate or shale out of the natural wall. Those pieces fall on to the road and because it is so steep they gradually make their way down hill when it rains heavily. In fact the rain dislodges some of it on its own.
Here's a van coming now. Ever so slowly, this holloway will become a widerway, my word, because now the road is tarmacked and the vehicles are wider. Being tarmacked the road is not eroding downwards anymore, it's just eroding widthways.
This is how holloways were made in the past, before tarmac, when there were more hooves than wheels passing along this route. There are many Iron Age remains around here, so we are talking about a lot of time. To make a holloway you need all of these things to come together, a route, on a steep hill, with a natural unpaved fragile surface, where it rains a lot. Gravity will do the rest.
Further down in the deepest part of the holloway, I am looking up towards the sky to see the base of an old tree, still rooted in the ground level of the field way above me.
For now, trimming the holloways is still just normal daily life around here.
Comments