In January this year the Heritage Lottery Fund announced that the Guild had been successful in its application for funding under the HLF Training Bursary Scheme. We shall be using the £180,000 for arranging and supervising the training of up to 40 apprentices on a one-to-one basis with Cornish hedgers. The scheme runs for 4 years, with about 10 new hedgers being trained each year. Each will complete a 50 working-days apprenticeship scheme, usually serving 20 working days with the main hedger before transferring to one or more different hedgers for ten working days, then returning to the first hedger for the last 20 working days of the apprenticeship. The days do not have to be consecutive and the time scale may vary by mutual arrangement between the apprentice and hedger. The Guild hopes to be able to pay £1500 to each apprentice completing his training and passing the Guild's craftsman test. We appreciate that not everyone has an aptitude for handling stone, and we tell each would-be apprentice that he is on trial for the first few days until the hedger is sure that he has the capacity to become a hedger. We are hoping to hear from hedgers who would like some free help with their hedging work, and from anyone who wants to be trained in the craft of Cornish hedging. The Guild emphasises that although hedging is very satisfying, it is hard physical work done in all weathers and that few will ever make a fortune at it. Although most good hedgers are seldom short of work, many combine hedging with other part-time work, often completely different.

Why is it that the standard of so much of our hedging has deteriorated? Many bosses do not know how to write a specification and many hedgers are being asked to do as cheap a job as they can manage. So the bosses get what they ask for - a cheap job - and are surprised when some of it falls down.

Part of the problem has been that in recent years there has been no good way of training new hedgers. Some youngsters have finished up with the cowboy hedgers who "just stand back and throw stones at it". Other youngsters have been at voluntary courses and events where they are given the impression that a couple of days' training is enough. This inevitably leads to poor work, and a misunderstanding of how proper hedging should be done.

The Guild has set up an informal no-paperwork apprenticeship scheme where the hedger gives training for 50 working days to an apprentice on a one-to-one basis, including two 5 day periods with other hedgers. Objective One money is available towards the apprentice's daily travelling. At the end, the apprentice will be able to pass the Guild's one-day practical examination to the Code of Good Practice, and to take on hedging work professionally. We hope to hold the first examination this autumn. The Guild has also helped to set up a two-day introduction to "Caring for Cornish Hedges".

Official approval has been given under Objective One (via Rural Progress) for establishing the Guild of Cornish Hedgers and the Code of Good Practice which means that 50% of our allowable costs will be met.

The Guild is often asked to recommend hedgers who will do a proper job, so we are preparing a list of hedgers to give out to those who ask. It will be in two sections: a list of craftsman members of the Guild, and a list of other hedgers who will encourage clients to have hedges built according to the Guild's Code of Good Practice. Please let us know (tel. 01-736-365-460), or email the Guild's stewards at www.guild@cornishhedges.com if you would like to be on the list.

Our website at www.cornishhedges.com has been refurbished, so please visit it and see what the Guild has to say in the cause of good hedging, and in the preserving and maintaining our historic heritage of hedges. We are grateful to Mark Ventham who has produced the site to our specification. We hope to continue making knowledge about our hedges available free to everybody by way of the website.

For those who have received this newsletter by post, our website now has many pages of information about Cornish hedges including aspects of their history, landscape and wildlife, and about the Guild, the Code of Good Practice for Cornish Hedges, the Hedge (& Wall) Importance Test (HIT) and a dozen Occasional Papers including useful advice on Health & Safety. These are the first of some 30 publications which are to deal with all aspects of Cornish hedges from technical papers (eg Building Hedges in Cornwall, Building and Care of Stone Stiles, Site Development, Ownership of Hedges) to the complete history of our hedges from prehistoric times to the present. The series will also contain several papers on the wildlife of Cornish hedges including trees, insects and mosses.

We are putting each publication on the web as soon as the draft text is ready, and we will add pictures later.

The paper on Health & Safety, which the Guild has discussed with the Health and Safety Executive at Plymouth, deals with the normal hedging situations, and avoids a lot of the paperwork that some people try to impose on the working hedger. Brief guidance is given on the different methods of handling hedging stone safely. It is available free as an Occasional Paper on the web or from either of the stewards.

Also newly available is the fully working version of the Hedge (&Wall) Importance Test conceived and produced by the Guild and hosted by the ERCCIS (Environmental Records Centre for Cornwall and the Isles of Scilly) website. The past year has seen much work in perfecting the HIT, and our thanks go to Nick Phillips of ERCCIS for many hours of programming to the Guild's specification His work was made possible by a grant from the Heritage Lottery Fund of £2400. The HIT is already used by the general public, free and easy to use. It uses an A4 survey sheet and help-note to assess the hedge's value for landscape, history and wildlife. Its 24 short questions measure the size, presence or absence of 60 factors which work out into marks-out-of-ten. The HIT database also automatically gives a detailed written description of the hedge. The result has been praised by Common Ground as being "refreshingly clear and easy to use". We suggest that you have a look at the HIT and try it out for yourself. Please tell us if you encounter any hitches - one of our volunteers gave many unpaid hours to helping remove the inevitable "bugs" to which all new programs are liable, but says that she is not infallible.

Any queries, please see us at the Royal Cornwall Show at the Conservation Area.

0r email the Guild's stewards at guild@cornishhedges.com.

or speak with Patrick Semmens on 01-736-788-816