This is a silly idea that keeps bugging me. There is a lot of rusty, bent and abandoned ironwork in English hedges. Some of it's recent enough, but some has been there for a hundred or more years, being ignored. I rather like the look of it, and started getting interested, and took a few photos.
Then I looked at the the interweb to find out a bit of history, and see what the experts have to say... and can't find anything, much. Maybe the search terms are wrong, but there's little or nothing to tell me when this stuff was made, who made it, how it fitted in with the social changes of the time, what it means. Then I started looking in libraries, and still can't find anything particularly informative.
Some of it is handmade, I think, from a local smithy, designed by the bloke with the huge forearms to go in a specific spot in a particular field. Some of it's vanity oneupmanship from some rich landowner out to impress, of course, but I'm more interested in the workaday, practical bits. Quite a lot clearly comes out of a catalogue, but not, I think, all of it. That's about as much as I know, and that's all guesswork.
Email the labourer if you know more than me. It would be hard to know less. Most of the photos are from Wiltshire, because that's where I mostly walk.
Of course, there are other bits of rusty iron that we see and ignore every day, but which have a story to tell. The bootscrapers outside many Georgian front doors, but not so many Victorian ones, or the coalhole covers or the pavement lights. Again, there's not much on the web about their history, manufacture or social relevance.
There's also the story told by the manhole covers we walk over every day. I've been tracing the old electricity supply system in London, which substantially changed in 1900 and again in 1948, leaving traces which can still be found.
Anyway, bear with me, this is a work in progress and I'm no webdesigner, so it'll take a while before any of it works properly. Email if you're actually interested.
(as is the post pictured at the top, gently rusting in a Wiltshire field. Though most of the fencing I've seen does not match their patented design.)
The rest of the catalogue is at the Museum of English Rural Life but the website is a pig to navigate.