Friday July 21, 2006



Wildlife Landscape Geology Woodland Code


Annual Events Arts & Entertainment Attractions Beaches Daily Diary Eating Out Liberation Day Museums Shops Sports Travel Weather & Tides Wildlife Local links

This is Jersey >Out and About >Wildlife >Landscape

This article from

Landscape

In the UK, hedges and walls are vanishing fast from farmland. In Jersey, they add to the charm of the countryside.

The word bocage is most frequently used to describe the patchwork of fields, hedges and sunken byroads so typical of the Norman countryside.

During the Second World War it was regularly cursed by Allied soldiers because the cover it afforded defenders made the Normandy campaign both difficult and fraught with danger. In Jersey our version of the bocage has no such sinister overtones, but, as in the Cotentin, it dominates the landscape.

Truly large-scale agriculture is mercifully unknown in the Island, and, time out of mind, cattle have been grazed and crops grown in fields that would be dismissed as pocket handkerchieves in many parts of the United Kingdom.

The hedges separating the fields include many species of plant, both large and small, but the hawthorn, which is capable of forming a dense, thorny barrier, is widely distributed.

Where fields are bordered by roads, granite walls often form boundaries. Some are regular affairs with mortar and even proper pointing, but the most appealing are rough and covered by pennywort or, in dry locations, by vivid yellow and grey lichens.

The deep valleys of the Island also add a special sort of field to the bocage - the c™til. Outsiders must wonder why these steep, inaccessible hillsides are cultivated, but all Islanders know that those facing south and west are potential goldmines, producing the earliest of the early potatoes.

While considering the Jersey bocage we should not forget that it is measured not in acres or hectares but in vergˇes. The going rate of exchange is 2.25 to the acre, but many Jersey people feel that the vergˇe is undervalued...

This article updated: 2002/07/02 09:31:16













......Daily Ditons......
Pus nou-s-etiboque la salete pus ou pu. The more you stir muck the worse it stinks.