Hannah Birch owns thirty-one notebooks from the walk, and every one of them is warped. They are the small yellow waterproof kind that surveyors carry, with a pencil loop on the spine. Page after page is filled with sketches of hedge cross sections, lists of plant names, and the times she saw particular birds. In one, beside a drawing of a blackthorn stump, she wrote a single sentence and underlined it twice.
It became the first line of her book. "A hedgerow is a border that decided, somewhere along the way, to become a home."
"I didn't know it was the start of anything," Birch says. "I was sitting in a ditch in Shropshire eating a cheese sandwich. It was raining. I wrote it down so I'd stop thinking about it."
Fieldwork, published in August by Common Ground, collects nineteen linked essays drawn from a 900-mile walk along the margins of farmland in England and Wales. It is on the 2026 RedSquibble Debut Shortlist, chosen from 1,140 submissions. It is also, in a year of loud debuts, one of the quietest books anyone has put out.
A surveyor's eye
For fourteen years Birch measured fields for a living. As an agricultural surveyor, she mapped boundaries for land sales, drainage schemes and subsidy claims. She walked edges with a GPS pole and a clipboard, logging the length of hedges and the width of margins to the nearest tenth of a meter.
"The job teaches you to see a field as a shape," she says. "Area, perimeter, access points. I was very good at it. I could tell you the acreage of a field by walking two sides of it. I couldn't have told you what lived in the hedge."
That changed slowly. On long days she began noting things that did not belong on any map. A wren's nest in a field gate. A badger path worn through a gap. An elderly farmer in Powys, who appears in the book as Owen Pritchard, who told her his grandfather had laid the hedge she was measuring, and that he could still tell which stretches his father had repaired by the angle of the stems.
She left surveying in 2022. The walk began the following April.
The route
Birch set out from a farm gate near St Davids in Pembrokeshire and ended, 97 days later, on the salt marsh edge of the north Norfolk coast. In between she followed field margins, bridleways and the unmapped grass strips that run between crops, crossing the Welsh Marches, the Shropshire hills, the Midlands clay and the flat arable country of the east.
She did not follow a single straight line. The route bends wherever a hedge led somewhere more interesting. She averaged just over nine miles a day, slept in a one-person tent or in spare rooms offered by farmers, and resupplied at village shops. She kept a strict rule about permission. If she could not find a public right of way or reach the landowner, she did not cross.
"People assume the countryside is open," she says. "It isn't. Almost every edge I walked belongs to someone. Half the book is about asking."
The essays follow the seasons more than the map. The early ones are wet and cold and full of blackthorn blossom. By the middle of the book it is haymaking time, and the prose slows down with the heat. The final essay, set on the marsh, is about an edge that is being moved by the sea.
"The job teaches you to see a field as a shape. I could tell you the acreage of a field by walking two sides of it. I couldn't have told you what lived in the hedge."
Writing it down
Birch wrote the book over two years at a kitchen table in Ludlow, working from the notebooks and from 4,000 photographs. She transcribed every notebook before she wrote a single essay. That took five months.
Her editor at Common Ground, Frances Yeo, says the manuscript arrived with a hand-drawn map folded inside the cover letter. "It was the most organized submission I've ever received," Yeo says. "Every essay had a grid reference."
Birch resists the idea that the book is a lament. Hedgerows in Britain have been lost in large numbers since the middle of the last century, and she writes about that plainly. But she spends more pages on the people replanting them, the contractors who still lay hedges by hand, and the farmers who leave a wide margin uncut because their mothers did.
"I didn't want to write a funeral," she says. "Most of what I walked past was alive. A lot of it was thriving. Somebody was looking after it."
The yellow notebooks now live in a shoebox under her bed. She has started a thirty-second. It has nothing in it yet but a date and the words "east coast, autumn," which is either the start of a second book or a very long weekend.
Fieldwork by Hannah Birch (Common Ground, 224 pages, $18) is out now.
Senior writer. Julian profiles debut novelists and the lives they write around. He spent a decade as a features reporter at newspapers across New England.
