Richard Negus recalls being a boy inside a hedge

An excerpt from Richard Negus' brilliant forthcoming book Words From the Hedge, a Hedgelayer's View of the Countryside, which is published on 1 May by Unbound

It is an otherworldly sensation, entering a hedge, as opposed to going around, over or along one. The last three are very human acts that any walker, horse rider or cyclist can do. Yet to physically climb inside a hedge, to be enveloped by the meeting arches of interwoven lattice, the plucking thorns, desiccated leaves, tight-balled nests and bramble, allows you to become a mouse and to join the ranks of hedgepig or weasel. Grown-ups have forgotten this sensation. Adults are stiff and creaky, they find such adventures too sharp and bloody, they fear the spiders, and for their eyes. But for small boys, with scant regard for claustrophobia and dog rose lacerations, the heart of a hedge is a wonderful world.

I creep in a frog-like crouch, back parallel with the earth and leaf litter. I keep my head lowered, eyes up, to see where I am going, through a flopping fringe. I can see a sliver of cerulean plastic fertiliser sack skewered to a blackthorn spine. For six feet I scrabble and scratch along in my amphibious gait until I reach the marker, pockmarked by a yellow silky ball. Spiderlings erupt into scattering thousands when I touch the flag I had set there as a visual reminder. Beneath the flap of polythene, on the crack ling earth, lies a rectangular box. It is partially camouflaged with twigs and leaves; branches of blackthorn provide further top cover. One third of the oblong is a deep, matt, Scots-pine green, the rest an opaque brown. I gingerly creep my arm forward; despite the caution, I still feel the blackthorn’s cat claws tug at my skin and raise scarlet weals. My fingers close around the box and I draw it out with even greater care. With no room to move in this prickly tunnel, I leave the way I went in, backwards frogging.

My backside and soles reappear out of the hedge, the rest of my skinny body, then a tousled mullet, follows. I kneel briefly on the lushness of the grassy margin, then stand up gratefully. A twig or two falls from my shoulder. I can feel another is caught in my collar and I shake my head like a minkhound fresh out of water. Only now can I hold the trap to the light and see what I have caught. The morning sun filters through the smoky Perspex, silhouetting a mammalian outline. I turn the trap to vertical and with a squeeze of finger and thumb I release two catches. The main body of the trap, with its treadle plate and trap door, comes away in my left hand. In the cup of my palm, the green cubicle contains a bank vole. It squats amidst a few floury husks of porridge oats, the bait I had placed in the device the evening before. The vole quivers silently, staring at me with bulging eyes, black and shining like tailors’ pins. The whiskers seem ridiculously long for the snubness of its nose; the shivering goes all the way to the tips. I shuffle the box to evict the little creature into my right hand. A sandpaper-scrape of minute claws on plastic soundtracks the vole’s slide into my cupped paw; there is no need to clutch the little mite. There, as I study, it continues to sit, stupefied by the complete horror of this giant creature with giant hands, a giant head and a silly haircut staring down at it. I kneel once more and place the back of my hand at the very edge of the hedge. I fully open my palm, flat like a plate, and the spell is broken. The vole, with an almost imperceptible kick, leaps into the embracing welcome of the emerging leaves and thorns, barbs and spines. I pull a notebook from the pocket of my military-surplus trousers and with a knife-sharpened pencil begin to scribble. I write 15/04/86 in the first column. In the second ‘BV/Male’. In the third I mark down ‘Hedge 4’. I snap the red-backed book shut, slide it into my trousers and scramble back into the hedge to reset the trap beneath the Fisons sack marker. I then make my way to the next little trap that I have buried deep in this hedgerow atop a bank.

A wren shouts his song at full volume, large lungs in a diminutive feathery egg-shaped frame, clinging with tiny talons to a maple top. A cock blackbird hops in the margin, taking the opportunity to inspect the aftermath of my hedgerow intrusion. Head cocked at ten past two, he grabs some tasty invertebrate morsel – his breakfast is served.

Richard Negus is a hedgelayer and conservationist. His debut book, Words from the Hedge, will be out on 1 May andis currently available to pre-order