The Meikleour Beech Hedge

Guinness World Records lists this as the tallest and longest hedge in the world. It is European beech, about 30 metres high and 530 metres long, running beside the A93 at Meikleour. Jean Mercer and her husband, Robert Murray Nairne, planted it on the Meikleour estate in the autumn of 1745. Why it grew so tall is the part people remember. Local tradition says the men who planted it left to fight at Culloden and never came back, so nobody cut it, and the hedge went up instead of out. That is a tradition rather than a record, and the sources say so. In 1906 the tree writers Elwes and Henry described it running 580 yards, its stems planted about 18 inches apart and averaging 95 feet in height. Those are figures for a row of trees, not for one trunk, and that is what this is, a line of beeches grown so close together that they read as a single wall. It is still a hedge in the gardening sense. It is trimmed roughly every ten years, and the most recent trim, in late 2019, was the first in almost two decades. The newest photographs we have found are from 2018. We have no reason to think anything has changed, but if you pass, tell us how it looks. It grows on private estate land and is seen from the public road, free and in every season. Autumn is when the wall turns copper.