FENCES SHAPE THE CHARACTER OF OUR CULTURAL LANDSCAPE

Fences are an important element of our cultural landscape, it is part of our identity. They are among the oldest evidence of farmers culture and express legal- and ownership relations as well as economic practices. Fences shape the face of our country. They form a kind of structure in a cultural landscape and offer support to the observer. They are the work of our hands - craftmanship. Fences enclose and exclude, they preserve and protect. Fences have always built up to enclose property, protect the herd, the farmland or neighboring pasture.

Since the early middle ages, fenc rights have regulated height and construction, use and maintenance obligations, fence passages and rights of the ways. Some of these rights and obligations are still recorded in the land register. Why were the old fences forms abandoned? Why did they dissapear from the picture of our landscape? There are several reasons. One of the reasons is the expenditure of material and time. Above all, time is saved today by buying the material such as nails and boards, a fact that would have been unimaginable more then 100 years ago because there was practically no cash. Finally the decline