Bocage

Bocage is a terrain of mixed woodland and pasture found in parts of northern France, southern England, Ireland, the Netherlands, Portugal, northern Spain and northern Germany, in regions where pastoral farming dominates land use. Its fields and country lanes sit between narrow ridges and banks topped with tall, thick hedgerows that break the wind but also limit visibility; during the Second World War, vegetation on these dirt mounds created barriers up to sixteen feet tall in parts of Normandy. A single square mile of bocage country can contain hundreds of small, irregularly shaped enclosed fields. The pattern became established during the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries as land was enclosed for pastoral farming and herd management, and in Ireland hedges, field walls and shelterbelts still cover about five percent of the land area.