The Hedge

[The Mouth of Sauron]

The Brandybucks planted and tended the Hedge for generations as a bulwark against the Old Forest .

Would it not have been more sensible to construct a wall ?

Another thing . When Frodo, Sam, Merry and Pippin are returning to the Shire , as they approach the Brandywine Bridge and its locked gates there is no reference to the North Gate in to Buckland . Surely Merry could have got through that gate , even although Gandalf says just prior to leaving the Hobbits to see Tom Bombadil that Merry might " have more trouble at the North Gate " than he thinks ?

[Alchisiel]

It might have been more sensible but I think where hobbits are concerned the reason they didn't build a wall is simply that they love all things that grow. It seems to me that they didn't like to build with brick, they'd rather have something natural instead of man made.

As for upon returning to the Shire, someone more learned than me will have to answer that.

[Lalwendë]

Why a hedge? Why, the answer's simple!

The English love nothing more than growing a ruddy big hedge right around their property. Especially so if there are neighbours there and there is the potential to block off all their natural daylight. I suspect that the Hobbits would have made use of that scourge of England, the Leylandii tree, one tree that I would more than welcome Saruman's hordes to chop burn and destroy. Hobbits are certainly insular enough to indulge in this heinous pastime, so I envisage the Hedge as a row of fifty foot high, funereal, evil Leylandii.

[Selmo]

The hedge was long (20 miles?). A vast ammount of stone or brick would be neded to replace it with a wall.
While I accept Lalwende's explanation as highly likely, perhaps another reason lies in the Hobbits' persistance in living in artificial caves long after they had migrated from real caves of the mountains; there was a shortage of good building stone in The Shire.
.

[Melilot Brandybuck]

I come from a rural area of England (that is very Shire-like IMO) and I would agree with Selmo. There was probably a lack of stone in that area. If any of you have been to Exmoor, one of the most beautiful places in England, you will have noticed that many of the old boundaries are hedges and not walls. A properly laid hedge, well tended over many years, is not only attractive, but will do the job of a wall and is much less expensive and time consuming to maintain.

I like the reference to Leylandii, the bane of English suburbia! But I would guess that the hobbit's hedge would have been of the traditional variety. Bank up a lot of soil, grow beech trees along the top, then when they are established, lay them horizontally so they grow into a sort of dense screen. Other varieties of trees and shrubs will probably establish themselves, ash or elder or blackthorn for instance, forming a dense and prickly hedge that would deflect the hungriest of wolves.

[Lalwendë]

The residents of Buckland unfortunately remind me of my weirdo neighbour who likes to put up high fences and has a paranoia complex that people are 'looking at him' or 'listening to him' or somesuch. Maybe he doesn't like it if people see his wife sunbathing in her hotpants? You'd want to scrub your eyes clean with the nail brush, so that's not a possibility. I don't know, but the neighbour dispute the Hobbits have with their neighbours in the Old Forest gives me chills of recognition.

I mean, look at the size of the thing. If it was in the UK it would come under the High Hedges Act and they'd have the local council on their backs to get the thing cut down:

on that side they had built a hedge: the High Hay. It had been planted many generations ago, and was now thick and tall, for it was constantly tended. It ran all the way from Brandywine Bridge, in a big loop curving away from the river, to Haysend

Listen to Merry's paranoia:

the Forest is queer. Everything in it is very much alive, more aware of what is going on, so to speak, than things are in the Shire. And the trees do not like strangers. They watch you. They are usually content merely to watch you, as long as daylight lasts, and don't do much. Occasionally the most unfriendly ones may drop a branch, or stick a root out, or grasp at you with a long trailer. But at night things can be most alarming, or so I am told. I have only once or twice been in here after dark, and then only near the hedge. I thought all the trees were whispering to each other, passing news and plots along in an unintelligible language; and the branches swayed and groped without any wind. They do say the trees do actually move, and can surround strangers and hem them in. In fact long ago they attacked the Hedge: they came and planted themselves right by it, and leaned over it

That's just like my neighbour who thinks I'm suspicious and foreign because not only did I not grow up on that street but I come from Across The Hills.

Finally, look at the damning evicence against the Hobbits. They're yobs! Neighbours From H*ll! When are they going to get an ASBO? Or better yet, be dragged through the mud on a lurid ITV Shockumentary?

But the hobbits came and cut down hundreds of trees, and made a great bonfire in the Forest, and burned all the ground in a long strip east of the Hedge. After that the trees gave up the attack, but they became very unfriendly. There is still a wide bare space not far inside where the bonfire was made.

I wouldn't have been surprised if they'd left a load of beer cans and hurled their pipeweed-arette ends over the hedge too. They were probably riding their mini-motos round there at all hours of the night too. Get orf my land indeed. No wonder the trees were 'unfriendly'. Understatement of the century, I'd have had the Hobbits slapped with an ASBO if I was the Old Forest.

[Oddwen]

It wouldn't do to fight plants with brick - remember what the Ents did to Isengard. You've got to fight like with like. I see the Hedge as "tame plants", rather like keeping a watchdog outside to keep the foxes away.

I wonder if the Hedge suffered any while Sharkey held sway in the Shire?

[The Squatter of Amon Rûdh]

Tolkien doesn't say that it did, and I think that he would have done had he imagined it. Perhaps it was left untended and untrimmed, but that would have done it no harm. Personally I think that Saruman would have been the last person to give the Old Forest a chance to intrude on the Shire, at least while he was living there. He had not enjoyed his last encounter with primeval woodlands at all. There's also the question of control: the High Hay was a barrier against entry into the Shire, and the more barriers there were around it, the easier it was for Saruman to keep track of comings and goings across its borders, and to curtail them if necessary.