Ancient enclosures tend to be irregular shaped with sinuous or curving boundaries, and 60% of those surviving today are bounded by hedges. In the past, these may have originated as low banks with parallel ditches, on top of which a hedge has grown up or been planted. Over one third of these boundaries were built to enclose land which had been claimed out of the Forest hunting land, which was probably a mix of open grazing, scrub and woodlands, in order to provide farm land. This is a process known as 'assarting'. Another quarter of these ancient enclosures were of the higher moorland, and 10% were of common land, by agreement between the commoners seeking to aggregate their landholdings.
Some of the largest early enclosures were undertaken by the lord of the Forest (or with his permission) to form vaccaries – large cattle farms – some of which may have been grazed by the lord's cattle, others being rented out. They generally included both moorland grazing as well as more sheltered fields on the lower lands, and the vaccary centres form some of the earliest farms in the Forest.
Post medieval enclosures brought more of the moorland fringe into active management and re-organised existing smaller and irregularly-shaped field systems. Enclosures of this period are more likely to have walls (52%) than hedges or fences, and to consist of large, regular, straight sided fields – at least partly because this was the easiest way to enclose the large upland areas.
Most of the enclosure of moorland fringes and former common land was undertaken by Parliamentary Acts around the middle of the nineteenth century. Such Acts required the land to be enclosed by walls and for roads, bridges and gates to be constructed to allow access, all at the expense of those to whom the new fields were allocated. The result of this was that the landowners brought more of their land into direct control and that common grazing became much more restricted. Because of the large amount of new walling required, much of it was carried out by specialist contractors, resulting in a more uniform appearance than the walls built by individual farmers at earlier times.
During this period hunting and shooting were also becoming more fashionable, and the wealthy were obtaining and developing suitable land holdings, such as those in the Forest of Bowland, for these purposes. In Bowland the management of much of the higher moorland was changed to encourage grouse, whilst in the lower areas shelter belts and nursery crops were planted to support the pheasants that were being bred and released for shooting.
In contrast to the walls running over the high moors, the lower valleys tend to be dominated by hedges. In some places new hedges were planted mainly with hawthorn, and have a very different appearance from the older, species rich, mixed hedgerows of the Ancient enclosures. It should be noted, however, that recent research has shown that most hedges have always been planted with mixed species, and that the dating of hedges by counting the number of species can be very misleading.
