the southwest. Up-country, the hedges are more likely to be thickets of hawthorn, beech, and hazel, but not here. You'll understand soon.
“Right, then. To the classroom!” Jamie hoisted himself into the van, Andrew followed, and they roared off, the others following more carefully up the potholed track.
Another hundred yards or so later, they pulled up in a cleared parking area and walked through a gate in an old stone hedge that led to Jamie's house, an ancient—medieval, Andrew guessed—gable-ended, two-story, slate-roof granite cottage with multiple ells and dormers and two massive chimneys. A sturdy stone barn stood some distance from, and perpendicular to, the house. The complex of buildings, hunched into the landscape, looked to Andrew as if they'd emerged spontaneously from the surrounding rock, without benefit of the hand of man.
“Thirteenth-century, some of it,” Jamie replied to their unspoken question. “With various later bits. Come in and I'll put on some tea. Then we'll get to it.”
The students milled about the ground-floor rooms. Burt, who was easily six-foot-four, had to duck beneath the beams, and everyone but Case hunched as they went through doors. Case himself prowled around scrutinizing the stonework, clearly impressed. From time to time, he would make small huh sounds of mason's admiration. Ralph Newsome played contentedly with a ghost-white cat that materialized from nowhere. And Becky, to Andrew's surprise, slipped into the kitchen to help Boden with the tea making. Andrew stood at the bookshelf beside one of the two massive hearths on the ground floor and thumbed through one volume after another on wall- and hedge-building styles and techniques. He'd had no idea the subject was so diverse, and it pleased him in a way that architectural theory never had. It had a rich vernacular history. It was form and function inseparable. It was real in the most elemental sense. It was stone made into art, art given timeless utility. He felt his heart expanding outward, into the immortality of it, as Jamie had said so simply and elegantly.
They took their mugs of tea outside to the front yard, which was rimmed with stone hedges. Andrew glanced around and realized the hedges varied in style every few yards; it was a display area for the craft of hedge building.
“There's something like thirty thousand miles of hedges here in Cornwall,” Jamie said. “Some of them are even older than that settlement I showed you. Back in the Neolithic, maybe six or seven thousand years ago, you could say stone was the first harvest of the people creating fields here. Farmers have been clearing fields ever since.”
Andrew looked at the bleak landscape around him and said, “It's a wonder they were able to raise anything but stone.”
“Ah, well; 'twas warmer here then, y'see. We know that now from pollen studies and such,” Jamie explained.
“How the devil did they move them?” Newsome asked.
“Not bloody easily, I promise you. Remember, we're talking about people scraping dirt away with antler picks and shovels fashioned from some dead animal's shoulder blade, levering the rock from the ground, rolling it on sections of log maybe, or end over end. When you figure there's roughly a ton of stone in every cubic meter of hedge, the scale of their accomplishment is staggering. And they didn't just pile the stones in rows. Even then, long before the Romans ever arrived, they had the skill to fashion hedges that'd last.
“Since then, as you can see with these demonstration hedges here, different styles evolved, driven mostly by what rock was available and, later, what tools could be used to shape the stone.”
Andrew looked around. There were hedges built of raw fieldstone; hedges with regular, alternating courses of shaped granite; hedges with horizontal layers of slate and shale that looked almost like the sedimentary beds they had been wrestled from. There were slate hedges with herringbone patterns, hedges with steps built in so you could cross from one side to the other, and hedges that incorporated slots and holes that allowed small animals and wildlife through, but not cows or sheep. There were hedges with stones on end at the top—coping stones, Jamie called them—and hedges with luxurious, flower-dappled turf tops.
“Normally, we'd stay right here and I'd teach you how to build a proper Cornish hedge on-site, but we've got a real job to do, or at least to get started, down in Boscastle. I thought we'd get the fundamentals over with here, though. I've got a hedge half built from a previous class.”
The group walked