Meet the hedgelayer with 200,000 Instagram followers – and a celebrity fanbase including Guy Ritchie, Monty Don and Charlie Mackesy 

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According to the National Hedge Laying Society, there are around 130 hedgelayers in the country. And although I cannot know this for certain, I would wager quite confidently that Paul Lamb is the only one with almost 200,000 Instagram followers.

The 48-year-old set up his account (@westcountry_hedgelayer) less than five years ago, on the advice of his daughters who are both in their 20s. Initially, it got about as many followers as you would expect from an Instagram filled with pictures and videos of a man in Somerset laying hedges – not that many. Then, one Friday, an American flower farmer with 1.2 million followers shared one of Lamb’s videos; 48 hours later, he had gone from having 1,000 people follow him, to 10,000. From there, things kept growing.

He can lay up to 20 metres of hedge in a day

Lamb was born in Essex, left school at 16 and moved to the West Country. He did odd bits of farm work until, aged 21, he met a woodsman called Bill Bugler who taught him how to lay hedges. This month, after 28 years of hedgelaying, Lamb is publishing a memoir: Of Thorn & Briar.

Anyone could plant a row of shrubs and trees, trim them to shape and call it a hedge. But hedgelaying is quite different. It involves cutting the plants that make up a hedge at their base, then bending them backwards so that they rest on top of each other diagonally. After that, the hedgelayer drives wooden stakes along the centre of the hedge and into the soil. Lastly, they weave ‘binders’ (long sticks of willow or hazel wood) between the stakes, to hold everything together. The result is a hedge that has been, essentially, fortified; a laid hedge should be strong enough that it could stop a cow from trampling through it and thick enough to keep a lamb from scurrying under it.

At a farm in Somerset, Lamb stands in front of a hedge he laid last winter – a 300-metre-long mass of blackthorn. Depending on the weather, he can complete 20 metres of hedge a day and earns around £20 a metre. That sounds like a lot of money but, once a hedge has been laid, it doesn’t need to be laid again for around 20 years. It just needs a small annual trim.

He cannot explain why so many people on the internet are suddenly so interested in hedges – ‘Who would have thought?’ – but they are. On Instagram, his followers are split 50/50 between men and women, predominantly British, and aged mostly between 40 and 55. ‘The teenagers couldn’t give a toss. I haven’t cracked that market yet.’ He has, however, cracked a celebrity market. Guy Ritchie, Monty Don and Charlie Mackesy are among Lamb’s 195,800 fans. The latter sends him occasional messages, saying things like, ‘I’ve planted a blackthorn!’

Social media has changed everything for him. ‘Because my life has just been woods, hedge, woods, hedge, you know? And then Instagram comes along.’ The platform got Lamb his book deal and, via Instagram, he has begun advertising hedgelaying courses to the public. In the past six months he has run 25 courses and all places sold out immediately.

Lamb is also, sometimes, recognised. Recently, he was at a pub in Wales when a group of strangers approached him. ‘They said, “Are you the hedgelayer?” And I said, “Well, I am a hedgelayer.” And they said: “No, but you are the West Country hedgelayer!”’

Paul with his girlfriend

Later, when we go to the farm shop café, the farm’s owner, Ian, comes over to our table. He says all of this – Lamb’s book, his Instagram fame – ‘couldn’t have happened to a nicer man’. When he adds that there will probably be a Hollywood film next, I ask who should star as Lamb. 

‘Daniel Craig, I think,’ replies Ian. 

‘More like Tommy Cooper,’ says Lamb.

All I will say about Lamb’s physical appearance is that last month, when he posted a photo of his girlfriend on Instagram for the first time, one of the top comments read: ‘Arghhhh you’ve broken a lot of women’s hearts.’ (Apparently, when his girlfriend told her 19-year-old daughter about Lamb, the teenager looked him up out of curiosity. ‘Oh my god, Mum,’ she said, after finding his Instagram, ‘you’re going out with an influencer.’)

It’s thought that hedgerows were ‘invented’ in Britain during the Bronze Age. They were a farming technique, designed to demarcate whose land was whose and to keep cattle contained. The oldest-known surviving hedge in the country is a one-kilometre stretch of shrubbery in Cambridgeshire called Judith’s Hedge. It was planted in the 11th century by William the Conqueror’s niece, Judith.

By the 1700s, 200,000 miles of hedgerows had been planted because of the Enclosure Act, when previously open and public fields were carved up and sold to private owners. (The Enclosure Act was bad news for peasants but great news for hedges.) At its peak England had more than 500,000 miles of hedges but, after the Second World War, the government began to encourage larger farms, and more than 100,000 miles of British hedgerows were destroyed. King Charles, the patron of the National Hedge Laying Society, has recalled his ‘horror’ at watching hedges being dug up when he was a child.

Today, there are around 240,000 miles of hedges in England. That is still loads – if you lined them all up end to end, they would circle the earth ten times – but, says Lamb, about 60 per cent of those are in poor condition: overgrown or overtrimmed, gappy at the bottom, unlaid.

Lamb doesn’t blame farmers for this neglect. ‘The easiest thing in the world is to use the farmer as a scapegoat and say: “He just doesn’t give a toss about nature.” I’ve never met a farmer who doesn’t love to see the spring coming on, or wildlife on the farm.’ But, farms are businesses, and ‘one farmer, on his own, trying to manage a farm, is normally already up against it’.

It’s a shame because, alongside being a stronger structure, a laid hedge has environmental benefits; it offers food and shelter for various birds, mice, voles and invertebrates, and it acts as a carbon sequester. ‘It’s a linear woodland,’ says Lamb. Also, bar a few patches of northern France and Belgium, hardly anywhere on earth has hedgerows. ‘They are a central part of what makes England England,’ wrote Bill Bryson. ‘Without them it would just be Indiana with steeples.’

Still, Lamb is hopeful about our hedges. When he started laying, in 1997, the work was scarce. Now, ‘I’m flat out. I’m already booking up for the next year. Suddenly, there’s this interest.’ Part of that is due to people who moved to the countryside during Covid. They bought houses with paddocks and are happy to spend money on good hedges. And part of it is a new, younger generation of farmers, who are more interested in the benefits of hedgelaying than their predecessors. ‘That’s what I find most encouraging.’

On the day I meet Lamb it is late February and unusually sunny. The hedgelaying season lasts from September to March (in the summer months, Lamb does wattle-hazel fencing) and the work, which is already hard and tiring, is often done in miserable weather. ‘There are days when you think: “S**t, I wish I’d tried harder at school”,’ he says, laughing. ‘I’m out here and I’m soaking wet and my hands are full of splinters. It’s hard graft. But for me – and without trying to sound too romantic – when I get a day like this, and the sun’s on my back, and the hedge is coming into leaf, and the birds are singing, well,’ he gestures to the enormous Somerset fields, ‘there are times where I feel like the luckiest person on earth.’

Paul’s book Of Thorn & Briar is published by Simon & Schuster, price £20. To order a copy for £17 until 20 April, go to mailshop.co.uk/books or call 020 3176 2937. Free delivery on orders over £25. 

Hamish Beeston, @WESTCOUNTRY_HEDGELAYER/INSTAGRAM