It was winter. Christmas had come and gone, and the branches were bare. While I dug field drain
trenches, Isaac began to pleach the hedges whose sides we had cut back earlier 'plashing' he
called it. Slowly he converted the tall unkempt hedges, twelve or more feet high in places, into
a neat three-foot, thick, intertwined barrier. He did a lot of preliminary trimming, then half cut
through the upright limbs almost at hedge-bottom level, bending them horizontal and twining
them between evenly spaced vertical stakes. The effect was of a living wattle fence.

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