After being told by the Heritage Lottery Fund to start work in April, the Guild's Apprentice Training Scheme is under way, with five apprentices already placed with their hedgers. The 40 would-be apprentices first have to find a good hedger who is willing to take them on – one of the hoops to jump through in order to get the HLF money. This will be £1,500 for each successful apprentice. They will not receive the third instalment of £500 until they have passed the Lantra practical test in building to the Code of Good Practice for Cornish Hedges (available from the Guild).

The Heritage Lottery Fund demands that the Guild has to put in roughly half the cost of the scheme, to match the HLF grant funding of up to £180,000. The Guild's contribution is the unpaid voluntary work involved in running the scheme. So far, with their time and work in getting the scheme up and running, our volunteers have donated over £60,000 worth of this equivalent funding.

The Guild has been entrusted with this public money to select the candidates most committed to the cause of Cornish hedging and most likely to make a good self-employed hedger. The challenge of finding a hedger to teach them plays a key part in sorting these out from the crowd. It means too that they will hopefully find a hedger not too far from home, so they will learn their local style of building. It gives the enquirer and the hedger a chance to assess each other as to whether they can get along well together, rather than the pairing being done willy-nilly by the Guild.

By asking enquirers to conduct their own search for a hedger we hope that that no one hedger will have been pestered by too many enquiries. Most enquirers begin by asking if we can recommend a hedger to them, but quickly understand why they are asked to find their own. No hedger would thank us for giving their name out to 160 people, the number of enquiries we have had to date, far exceeding the number of places we have available. We are hoping to fill 20 places during the first year.

We advise the enquirers to persevere in 'asking around', rather than ringing yellow-pages numbers, as many hedgers work only by word-of-mouth recommendation. We suggest that the hedger might appreciate fifty days of free labour, without paperwork. The fifty days do not have to be consecutive but can be arranged mutually to suit hedger and apprentice as long as the apprentice can average two days a week and finish within six months. We hope that retired and semi-retired hedgers will be happy to pass on their lifetime skills, many of which have never been written down.

The drawback is that there is a shortage of good hedgers able and willing to pass on their traditional knowledge and skill, so, partly depending on where the enquirers live, most are finding difficulty in locating a suitable hedger. Obviously, if this was easy it would mean that there was not a need for new hedgers. We welcome those would-be apprentices who are sticking with us despite initial difficulties. We have been greatly encouraged by the good attitude of those hedgers who have been 'found' and have agreed to take an apprentice. We are looking to the genuine hedgers who know that unless a new generation is properly taught to the old standards, the unique craft of Cornish hedging will be lost.

We very much regret the loss of hedger Charlie Fitzgibbon, who sadly passed on just as he was to begin training his son under the HLF scheme. We are particularly sorry about this as we had been pleased to be able to sponsor the traditional way of carrying on the skill of hedging from father to son.

For more information about the HLF scheme please email guild@cornishhedges.com or ring (01736) 365 460.

Among the Heritage Lottery requirements is a certain amount of publicity, so this year as well as our usual appearance at the Royal Cornwall Show we set up the Guild's stand at Liskeard, Stithians and Launceston Shows, also the Cornish Gorsedd, finishing with the Kehelland Apple Day on 20th October. With our small team of volunteers we found it quite taxing to attend three shows in one week, but we were happy to see a number of old friends and found the intelligent interest from the public encouraging. There was definitely less of the “I've got five acres and want someone to come and mend my hedges for nothing” kind of enquiry, and more appreciation of hedging as a skilled craft for which it is only right that good money should be paid. We had some rain at Liskeard and Launceston but were impressed by the way the organisers dealt with the problems arising. Plenty of tractors were at work all day hauling cars out of the mud and the traffic was kept moving.

Anyone who was at the Royal Cornwall on the first day may have noticed the brief appearance of the Guild in the main ring to be the first to receive this new award. The trophy, to be kept for one year, is a handsome turned Cornish ash bowl, together with a framed certificate presented to the Guild by the Royal Cornwall Agricultural Association and signed by Prince Charles, 'for providing knowledge of the traditional skill of hedge building in Cornwall'. The prize of £1,000 forms a very welcome addition to Guild funds and will be put towards the cause of good hedging.

More papers have been posted on our website (www.cornishhedges.com). 'Cornish Hedges in Gardens', 'How Old is That Cornish Hedge?' and 'Who Owns That Cornish Hedge?' should be of interest to the general public who have Cornish hedges around their property. One of our aims is to raise awareness of the value of Cornish hedges and to gain their owners' interest in looking after them properly. We say that instead of getting hedges in need of repair cleared away in favour of a concrete block wall, they should be proud of their assets and employ a good hedger, just as they employ a builder or a plumber for other skilled work and improvements to their property.

'Who owns That Cornish Hedge?' might interest some of our new hedgers as it looks at the legal aspect of hedges in Cornwall, especially with regard to boundaries. It is not commonly known that a Cornish hedge, unlike an English hedgerow, has a legal width, so ownership often depends on whether the boundary runs down the middle of the hedge's width or to one or other side of it. This affects what rights the owner has. 'How Old is That Cornish Hedge?' gives advice that should help hedgers to recognise whether the hedge they are asked to work on, perhaps to move to another spot, might have historical significance which could alter the owner's approach, perhaps persuade them to have the hedge properly repaired and restored rather than removed.