The Meikleour Beech Hedge: The World's Tallest Hedge

Each major claim carries one of three labels. established means supported by primary records, official bodies or several independent reliable sources. shared means the core fact is sound but sources disagree on details, dates or interpretation. traditional means widely repeated but not traceable to a primary or independent source.

The planting date and the record dimensions are well established. The Culloden story is local tradition: it is told on the estate's own signs and in many guidebooks, but there is no record identifying the planters who supposedly died.

A hedge planted in 1745

established In the autumn of 1745, as Charles Edward Stuart's Jacobite army marched south, Jean Mercer and her husband Robert Murray Nairne had a line of beech trees planted along the boundary of their estate at Meikleour, beside the road. Beech is often grown as a hedge because, when clipped, it keeps its dead leaves through winter, giving year-round screening. The Meikleour hedge was never kept low, and over more than two and a half centuries it has grown into a towering wall.

The Culloden story

traditional The story told locally is that the men planting the hedge left their work to join the Jacobite army, laying their tools under the half-planted hedge, and were killed at Culloden on 16 April 1746. The hedge, so the story goes, was allowed to grow towards the heavens in their memory. Robert Murray Nairne is himself sometimes said to have died at Culloden. The legend is moving and widely repeated, but it has not been documented.

The world's tallest hedge

established Guinness World Records recognises the Meikleour hedge as the tallest and longest hedge in the world, at about 30 metres high and 530 metres long. It was already remarkable by 1906, when the dendrologists Henry Elwes and Augustine Henry described it in their great survey, The Trees of Great Britain and Ireland.

Cutting a hedge 30 metres high

established Trimming the hedge is a major operation, done about once every ten years. Workers use cherry pickers and hydraulic platforms to reach the top, and the work can take weeks. The trim in late 2019 was the first in almost twenty years. Measurements of its height vary slightly depending on when it was last cut.

A seasonal landmark

established The hedge is fresh green in spring and summer and turns a rich copper and gold in autumn, holding many of its brown leaves into winter. It can be seen from the A93 throughout the year and has become a popular stop for visitors to Perthshire.

A planted tree of the Age of Improvement

established Beech is not native to Perthshire. Richard Mabey, in Flora Britannica (1996), explains that beech pollen in the Hampshire basin dates from about 6000 BC, so the tree just counts as native to Britain, but that it spread naturally only as far as a line between the Bristol Channel and the Wash. Everywhere further north and west, Scotland included, beech is a planted tree. Mabey does not mention Meikleour, but his account of the tree's history explains why a beech hedge was planted there when it was. He notes that it was in the eighteenth century, the "Age of Improvement", that beech began to be valued for ornament and timber rather than just firewood and mast for livestock. A long beech boundary on a Perthshire estate in 1745 is very much a product of that fashion.

established Mabey also observes that planted beech landmarks are typically avenues and hilltop groves, valued for how they look in the landscape rather than for any folklore. That fits Meikleour, whose fame rests on its sheer scale rather than on any custom attached to the trees themselves.

• Beech is not native to Scotland; it spread naturally only as far north as a line between the Bristol Channel and the Wash, so every beech at Meikleour was planted.
• The hedge is about as tall as a ten-storey building.
• It is more than half a kilometre long.
• It was planted the same autumn that the Jacobite army marched into England.
• It is trimmed only about once a decade.
• Beech hedges keep their dead leaves through winter.

• Myth: The planters died at Culloden and the hedge was left to grow in their memory. This is local tradition, told on the estate's signs and in guidebooks. There is no record identifying the planters who supposedly died, and the story has not been documented.
• Disputed: Exactly how tall the hedge is. Guinness World Records gives about 30 metres, but measurements vary slightly depending on when it was last cut.
• Myth: The hedge is a native Scottish woodland feature. Beech spread naturally only as far as a line between the Bristol Channel and the Wash, so every beech at Meikleour was planted.