Hannah Birch's walking boots live in a garden shed in Ludlow, on a nail beside the hedge-laying billhook she bought last winter. They are brown leather, resoled once during the walk by a cobbler in Leominster who refused to charge her and asked only for a postcard from the end. The left heel is worn at a slant from ninety-seven days of walking on the camber of field edges. She says she could not throw them out if she tried.
Fieldwork, her collection of nineteen linked essays drawn from a 900-mile walk along the margins of farmland in England and Wales, came out in August from Common Ground and is on the 2026 RedSquibble Debut Shortlist. We spoke about the parts of the walk that did not make it into the notebooks, and the shape she chose for the book instead of a straight line.
The shape of the book
Most walking books go day by day. Why essays?
Because I hate the phrase "and then." I've read so many travel books that are just a list of and-thens with weather in between. A field margin doesn't work that way. You pass the same kind of edge a hundred times, and it only means something the fortieth time, when you finally see it properly. Essays let me go back. I could put a ditch in Pembrokeshire next to a ditch in Lincolnshire and let them talk to each other.
How did you arrive at nineteen?
I wrote thirty-four. Each one was built around a single kind of edge. A headland, a gateway, a beetle bank, a ditch, a stile, a sunken lane. Then I cut every essay that was only there because something happened on that day rather than because the edge itself had something to say. Nineteen survived. The ones I lost were mostly anecdotes, and anecdotes are cheap on a long walk. Something odd happens every afternoon.
What did the walk do to your body?
My right knee gave out in week five, somewhere in Herefordshire, and I spent four days walking at half pace with it strapped. It rained for eleven days straight in the Marches. I had blisters on top of blisters. But by the second month I was stronger than I've ever been. The strange part was coming home. I sat on a sofa in Ludlow and my legs kept twitching for a week, as if they still expected a gate.
Company on the margins
The book feels solitary, but you met a lot of people.
I counted once, from the notebooks. Just over two hundred conversations longer than a few minutes. Farmers, hedge contractors, dog walkers, a man in Warwickshire who was mapping every ash tree in his parish on his own time. I slept in thirty-eight spare rooms. A farmer's wife near Kington fed me a roast dinner on a Tuesday because, she said, I looked like I needed a Sunday.
"I sat on a sofa in Ludlow and my legs kept twitching for a week, as if they still expected a gate."
Were you ever lonely?
In the east, yes. In Wales and the Marches the fields are small and there is always a house within shouting distance. Then you reach the big arable country in Cambridgeshire and Norfolk and you can walk a whole day beside one field and not see anyone. The margins get thinner there too. I felt very exposed. That's the essay called "Headland," and it's the only one I wrote in a single sitting, because I didn't want to stay in that feeling any longer than I had to.
Wales gave you a second language for the landscape. How much of it made it into the book?
Less than I wanted. Farmers in Powys would give me the Welsh word for a gap in a hedge, or a bank, or a particular kind of wet field, and every one of them was more precise than the English. My editor let me keep eleven Welsh words. I fought for fifteen. Each regional style of laid hedge has its own vocabulary too, stakes and binders and pleachers, and I've made my peace with explaining a few of them in a footnote.
Learning the hedge
You finished the walk, wrote the book, and then learned to lay a hedge yourself. Why?
Because I'd spent two years describing something I couldn't do. That started to feel dishonest. Last winter I did a weekend course with a contractor in Shropshire and laid about twelve meters of hawthorn, very badly. You cut each stem most of the way through at the base and bend it over so it keeps living and grows sideways. My pleachers were a mess. He told me the hedge would forgive me in about three years.
Fieldwork is published by an American press. What do American readers ask you?
Whether hedgerows are like the fencerows in the Midwest, which is a lovely question. The answer is sort of. A lot of readers have written to say they've started noticing the strips along their own roads, the bits nobody mows. That's all I wanted, really. For people to look at the edge nearest their house and ask who looks after it.
Where do you walk now?
Mostly the same two miles out of town. I know every gate on it. I know which one sticks.
She says the twelve meters of hawthorn came into leaf in May. Two of her stems died. The rest bent the way they were supposed to and kept growing sideways, which is all a laid hedge is ever asked to do.
Fieldwork by Hannah Birch (Common Ground, 224 pages, $18) is out now.
Books editor. Noor runs RedSquibble's reviews and interviews and chairs the process that produces the annual Debut Shortlist.
