A beautiful task The re-creation of Britain's ancient hedgerow habitats

The 30-metre ridge runs across the moor near Yar Tor on Dartmoor, one of several faint lines that crisscross the land like aeroplane contrails. Although the open moorland looks wild, we are standing on some of Britain's oldest farmland.

- Phoebe Weston

The 30-metre ridge runs across the moor near Yar Tor on Dartmoor, one of several faint lines that crisscross the land like aeroplane contrails. Although the open moorland looks wild, we are standing on some of Britain's oldest farmland. These ridges, called reaves, are the ghosts of farming's most wildlife-rich legacy: hedges.

"These reaves sadly have no function today other than to delight us. Or some of us," says the ecologist Robert Wolton. But Dartmoor's reaves are the skeletons upon which more recent hedges were built: hundreds of thousands of miles of them.

After Ireland, Britain is believed to be the most hedge-dense country in the world, and Wolton says the majority of them are more than 280 years old. Recent laser scanning shows England has enough hedges to wrap around the world almost 10 times. They are, by far, the country's biggest nature reserve, which is why community groups, farmers and charities are rallying together to plant hedges of the future that will offer the same support to wildlife.

"Wouldn't you like to do something that you knew might be there in a thousand years?" says Jon Stokes, the director of trees, science and research at the Tree Council and the chair of Hedgelink, who describes planting a hedge as "one of life's great joyful things".

Hedgelink is a partnership of more than 30 organisations planting and restoring the next generation of ancient hedges.

After the second world war many hedges were ripped out, with approximately half lost between the 1940s and 1990s due to agricultural intensification and development. "Since 1990 we seem to have turned the tide," says Stokes. Recent figures suggest the net length of hedges is stable, and possibly increasing.