Living as I do in an area where field boundaries are dominated by drystone walls, I delight in coming across traditional natural hedges when I travel around the country. I also despair when I see evidence of hedging which has been destroyed, ancient nature runs bulldozed in minutes for the sake of ‘progress’.  Happy I was then to hear that Devon Wildlife Trust (DWT) have just planted a series of new hedges at its Dunsdon National Nature Reserve to help restore a network of small fields that would have once been a feature of the landscape. The site, near Holsworthy, was planted up with locally produced native species including a mixture of hawthorn, ash, oak, hazel and rowan. As is traditional in Devon they will sit on hedge banks which were created last year. Gary Pilkington, DWT’s senior reserves officer, said: “These new hedges will provide essential wildlife corridors at these culm grassland sites. The hedges are replacing ones that were removed through agricultural changes in the years before DWT took charge of the land. We used Tithe maps from the early 1900s to work out exactly where the original hedges were located.” The project has been supported thanks to funding from the Tree Council’s Real Hedge Fund, working in conjunction with the National Hedgelaying Society and Stella Artois – I’ll drink to that.