The Reversed "S"

I've been meaning to capture this shot for some time. Why? Because it excites me!

Focus your attention on the curving hedge lines. When the Open Fields of the township were enclosed in the early 1770s, the surveyors laid out straight hedges to divide the allocation of land to different people. Where someone, like the Lord of the Manor, was allocated a large area the boundaries were straight but any subdivisions could be curved like this.

Now here is the exciting point. Curved hedges were laid along the line of the old ploughed furlongs which, typically, had the curving shape of a reversed "S".

The curved hedges that you see here follow the line of a system of ploughing that existed for many hundreds of years, a system of ploughing that slowly went out of fashion after the time of the enclosures

If you can take any more excitement, how about this? It is not really known why the ploughing in the Open Fields followed the reversed "S" pattern. No one (anywhere in the country) thought to record the reason at the time. There are many theories, I have my own, but there is no definitive answer and there probably won't ever be.

The Open Field System, its beginnings and its end, provides a fascinating subject of study.