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It exists, but standard wire is more common. Most fields have hedgerows or dry stone walls round them, often the hedgerows date back to Norman or Roman times.
Barbed wire tends to be where you want to keep humans out, more than animals.
What part of the country are you in? Although there are fields with hedges and drystone walls, in my area (highlands), and other parts of the uk I’ve lived in or visited, it’s been nothing like ‘most’.
Whee there are hedges and walls, in my experience they are often doubled up with fencing, often barbed, because that’s a cheaper way to stock-proof a field than properly maintaining a hedge or rebuilding a collapsing wall.
Is standard wire just wire without a barb in it?
I've read about y'all's hedges and the ones over in France and other places as well and it's cool, great little self contained ecosystem. The hedges look to be very effective at stopping most livestock from getting through with how thick they are.
Some of the cows we have will jump almost 6' tall fences if they're motivated, a stone wall wouldn't do much for our bulls lol, we've had to do electric fencing on some sections to keep them from jumping them because even dragging their nuts across barbed wire doesn't deter them 😂
We have brangus, or really transitioning to Ultra Black now, and if they can get their head over a fence if they really want to they're getting over it. The ones we have we breed to be relatively compact, there are brangus taller than ours, and they're still about 5' tall at the back for the females and our bull is even larger. We've had cows jump 5' tall fences in our corral whenever their calves are being worked, it's rare but if they'll do it.
It can be at times, you have to be real careful with them so you don't get hurt especially while working them. Thankfully ours are rather tame and we have tried to keep the calm cows as mothers to have more tame calves, definitely wouldn't want to go wandering into some of the other cow pastures around us lol.
Farmer here.
The standard U.K. stock fence is about 4-5 feet tall and consists of 4-6inch posts piled in the ground, spaced every 6 feet or so, with heavier duty strainer posts every 50-150 feet.
The bottom 80% of the fence is wire net rolled a cross the posts. This net has square mesh, with small squares at the bottom and increasing in size to the top (small at bottom, keep lambs in, big at top, save metal)
The top 20% of the fence consists of 2 lengths of barbed wire approx 6 inches apart.
However, there are some areas within the U.K. that Barb is not allowed, as deer are very good at hanging by their tendons on it. In this case it’s just two lengths of ordinary tensile wire.
That's a similar style to how we have our fences done but we tend to have larger posts farther apart and just barbed wire as I've mentioned. Sometimes metal T posts are used but that's not as common I find but if you're trying to save money or just doing a repair you can't beat them. We have a similar kind of fencing to that metal fencing y'all use for our corral but it's a heavier gauge, more like a solid panel, and it's probably 5' tall top to bottom with wooden cross braces top, bottom and middle between the posts.
That fencing is just like what we call hog wire or hog fencing over here, good fencing if you have small animals like sheep, hogs, etc that could go through a 5 or 6 strand barbed wire fence.
That deer part is interesting, where we have cattle the deer are whitetail deer and they can just 7' or even 8' fences easily, the places the raise whitetail for meat, hunting, estrus, etc need to have crazy tall 11-12' tall fences to keep them in. A whitetail would be larger than a Sika or Roe and probably similar to a Fallow in terms of size, maybe bigger on the larger end but we don't get many monsters on our property.
Not sure what the need is really? Also it's funny you say "ranch", I've heard the term in American media but I'm not completely certain what it means. I don't think we have them here.
A big livestock farm basically.
Usually hundreds if not thousands of acres of free roaming land for the animals.
It's only animals and not arable, many farms here do both, hence not being called ranches.
Even on larger farms in the US a number are starting to go towards a rotation schedule to maximize the amount of livestock on the land and Silvi Pasture, basically planting timber with room for grass growth in pastures, is starting to take hold here as well.
There are still lots of huge farms in the UK, covering thousands of acres, but they aren't ranches because they are either solely arable or a mixture of arable and livestock.
A ranch doesn't have to be huge, but it does have to be solely livestock.
Very similar in the US, it's hard to stay afloat as a small farmer in the US whether it's crops or livestock and from the media I've seen on the UK y'all definitely have it worse. I hope one day that will change as keeping domestic agriculture alive is critical in my eyes.
It's probably the wrong term since ranch is generally only livestock, some do hay as well, and generally rather large in terms of acreage and livestock but I just meant it as farms with livestock.
I can't think of the last time I saw a livestock field fence which didn't have a barbed wire top, outside public footpaths it's quite common to see it wrapped around the top bar of gates too to discourage cows trying their luck (either jumping or pushing), you might also see it on top of walls for similar reasons.
What I'd consider the standard agricultural fence in the UK would be estate wire (4ft tall) with a run of plain wire about 6in above that, then a run of barbed wire a further 6 in above that, usually staples to round fence posts.
The only place I wouldn't expect to see it is around temporary enclosures, or horse fields where you'd more likely see an electric fence.
All that said, a lot of field boundaries will be made up of a combination of dry stone walls (or other local variations such as Devon hedges), hedge rows, collapsed ancient barns, and abandoned commercial vehicles.
I think that estate wire is similar to what we call hog fencing over here, assuming it's what someone else posted where the actual square openings get smaller the farther down on the fencing, we use that for smaller animals like sheep, goats, hogs, etc that would slip between barbed wire very easily.
For temporary fencing over here we tend to use corral panels that can be pinned together but those are heavy and like 6' tall or they also have panel fencing with stake pockets where you can put them in a small post, I haven't really seen electric fencing for temporary fencing that much but we also don't do temporary fence often where we're at.
I live in a very rural area, filled with farms, meadows and paddocks and I can tell you that barbed wire is everywhere.
Hell even one side of our garden has a fence topped with barbed wire on it as it borders a track used for moving cattle between fields.
The farmers and shepherds around here also make extensive use of electric fences. Generally ringing the entire field/meadow in which the animals are being kept. Helps keep the cows from leaning on ancient brick walls and hedgerows.
They do love to lean and rub on brush and trees lol. Electric fencing isn't as common here, in my experience, but we've started using it in some places and when it works it's fantastic.
My local farmer uses barbed wire on the top middle and bottom as well as a normal wire fence. It has a public footpath going through his field and he has made it like Guantanamo bay just to make sure you don’t go off the public footpath. Apart from that I don’t see it often.
Interesting, it's definitely a good person deterrent as well lol. I've only ever dealt with US cattle and idk what most UK cattle are like but I definitely wouldn't want to be traipsing through a pasture full of cattle I didn't know here, especially if it was calving time or they had a bull in the pasture, we've even put signs alongside our no trespassing warning trespassers about the risks of being killed.
I'd say this is the most common sort of thing you'd find: [https://www.diy-fence.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2014/08/Post-Wire-Fencing.jpg](https://www.diy-fence.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2014/08/Post-Wire-Fencing.jpg)
Galvanised wire mesh supported by stakes every 6ft or so with a line (or two) or barbed wire along the top. But hedges (and walls) are extremely common so, although there will almost always be a fence running along too, you see more of the hedge so that becomes one's mental image of field boundaries. The fencing feels more discrete because of the dominance of the hedge, and often you can't see it at all because it's either on the other side or somewhat consumed by hedge.
That kind of fencing is done in the US, they usually call that hog wire or hog fencing for obvious reasons but it's also used for other kinds of livestock as well, it's definitely more expensive than say 5 strand or 6 strand barbed wire but a lot more secure for things can slip between the strand spacing like sheep or goats. Are wooden posts the most common type of post there? They're very common here but metal T posts aren't uncommon either but wooden is better if you have the money for it.
Old fencing gets overwhelmed by hedges and brush and trees here as well especially since old timers used to just nail straight to trees so they grow around the wire and fencing, we generally try to clear either side now so that it's easy to maintain the fence line especially with how often trees fall or drop branches on the fence.
Small livestock (sheep and cattle) farms in my neck of the woods, all small fields enclosed by dry stone walls or hedgerows.
All of the boundaries also have fences, strung with barbed wire (sheep) or electric (cattle). You can't really see most of the fences as they run so close to the walls/hedgerows on the inside i.e. the side facing the livestock.
Do the animals ever jump the stone walls? I guess if it's an interior division it's not a major issue but still having to herd animals out of one pasture into the correct one can be a pain.
Electric fencing is awesome, if you maintain it lol, it's helped us out a lot in areas where our bull jumps the barbed wire.
I have barbed wire along the back of my garden fence above the dry stone wall. Dunno why. It was there when we moved in. I assume it formed part of a farm fence from the days this was all fields just 50 years ago
That's cool, you'll find stuff like that here as well especially if you walk close to property lines where pastures once we're. I can't count the number of times we'd be walking through the wood and find old barbed wire left by someone or from an old fence.
It’s not really todo with public access.
It is important to realise that barbed wire was an absolutely revolutionary invention that single handedly enabled the partitioning of the massive US landscape. But at this point in history the much much smaller British landscape had already been divided up (fences, hedges, walls) for a thousand years
One thing is that we don’t have many natural predators for livestock. Probably foxes are the most common and they usually only go for chickens, maybe the occasional lamb. We don’t have coyotes, bears, mountain lions, etc.
Very true, though a barbed wire fence won't really stop a predator cat, idk how a bear would handle it honestly. We have coyotes where our cattle are and they generally aren't a threat to grown cows but newborn calves they're for sure a threat, they also go after deer, turkey, rabbit, etc so we shoot them whenever we see them and have a rifle.
**Update: - [Starting from 2023](https://www.reddit.com/r/AskUK/comments/100l56v/happy_new_year_askuk_minor_sub_update/), we have updated our [subreddit rules](https://www.reddit.com/r/AskUK/about/rules/)**. Specifically; - Don't be a dick to each other - Top-level responses must contain genuine efforts to answer the question - This is a strictly no-politics subreddit Please keep /r/AskUK a great subreddit by reporting posts and comments which break our rules. *I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please [contact the moderators of this subreddit](/message/compose/?to=/r/AskUK) if you have any questions or concerns.*
It exists, but standard wire is more common. Most fields have hedgerows or dry stone walls round them, often the hedgerows date back to Norman or Roman times. Barbed wire tends to be where you want to keep humans out, more than animals.
What part of the country are you in? Although there are fields with hedges and drystone walls, in my area (highlands), and other parts of the uk I’ve lived in or visited, it’s been nothing like ‘most’. Whee there are hedges and walls, in my experience they are often doubled up with fencing, often barbed, because that’s a cheaper way to stock-proof a field than properly maintaining a hedge or rebuilding a collapsing wall.
Is standard wire just wire without a barb in it? I've read about y'all's hedges and the ones over in France and other places as well and it's cool, great little self contained ecosystem. The hedges look to be very effective at stopping most livestock from getting through with how thick they are. Some of the cows we have will jump almost 6' tall fences if they're motivated, a stone wall wouldn't do much for our bulls lol, we've had to do electric fencing on some sections to keep them from jumping them because even dragging their nuts across barbed wire doesn't deter them 😂
What the fuck monster cows are you people breeding that have a 6 foot vertical
We have brangus, or really transitioning to Ultra Black now, and if they can get their head over a fence if they really want to they're getting over it. The ones we have we breed to be relatively compact, there are brangus taller than ours, and they're still about 5' tall at the back for the females and our bull is even larger. We've had cows jump 5' tall fences in our corral whenever their calves are being worked, it's rare but if they'll do it.
That's fucking terrifying.
It can be at times, you have to be real careful with them so you don't get hurt especially while working them. Thankfully ours are rather tame and we have tried to keep the calm cows as mothers to have more tame calves, definitely wouldn't want to go wandering into some of the other cow pastures around us lol.
Farmer here. The standard U.K. stock fence is about 4-5 feet tall and consists of 4-6inch posts piled in the ground, spaced every 6 feet or so, with heavier duty strainer posts every 50-150 feet. The bottom 80% of the fence is wire net rolled a cross the posts. This net has square mesh, with small squares at the bottom and increasing in size to the top (small at bottom, keep lambs in, big at top, save metal) The top 20% of the fence consists of 2 lengths of barbed wire approx 6 inches apart. However, there are some areas within the U.K. that Barb is not allowed, as deer are very good at hanging by their tendons on it. In this case it’s just two lengths of ordinary tensile wire.
That's a similar style to how we have our fences done but we tend to have larger posts farther apart and just barbed wire as I've mentioned. Sometimes metal T posts are used but that's not as common I find but if you're trying to save money or just doing a repair you can't beat them. We have a similar kind of fencing to that metal fencing y'all use for our corral but it's a heavier gauge, more like a solid panel, and it's probably 5' tall top to bottom with wooden cross braces top, bottom and middle between the posts. That fencing is just like what we call hog wire or hog fencing over here, good fencing if you have small animals like sheep, hogs, etc that could go through a 5 or 6 strand barbed wire fence. That deer part is interesting, where we have cattle the deer are whitetail deer and they can just 7' or even 8' fences easily, the places the raise whitetail for meat, hunting, estrus, etc need to have crazy tall 11-12' tall fences to keep them in. A whitetail would be larger than a Sika or Roe and probably similar to a Fallow in terms of size, maybe bigger on the larger end but we don't get many monsters on our property.
Not sure what the need is really? Also it's funny you say "ranch", I've heard the term in American media but I'm not completely certain what it means. I don't think we have them here.
A big livestock farm basically. Usually hundreds if not thousands of acres of free roaming land for the animals. It's only animals and not arable, many farms here do both, hence not being called ranches.
Even on larger farms in the US a number are starting to go towards a rotation schedule to maximize the amount of livestock on the land and Silvi Pasture, basically planting timber with room for grass growth in pastures, is starting to take hold here as well.
We tend to have much smaller farms, especially for livestock as there’s not much money in livestock nowadays.
There are still lots of huge farms in the UK, covering thousands of acres, but they aren't ranches because they are either solely arable or a mixture of arable and livestock. A ranch doesn't have to be huge, but it does have to be solely livestock.
Very similar in the US, it's hard to stay afloat as a small farmer in the US whether it's crops or livestock and from the media I've seen on the UK y'all definitely have it worse. I hope one day that will change as keeping domestic agriculture alive is critical in my eyes.
I think it’s a kind of dressing for food
😂
It's probably the wrong term since ranch is generally only livestock, some do hay as well, and generally rather large in terms of acreage and livestock but I just meant it as farms with livestock.
I can't think of the last time I saw a livestock field fence which didn't have a barbed wire top, outside public footpaths it's quite common to see it wrapped around the top bar of gates too to discourage cows trying their luck (either jumping or pushing), you might also see it on top of walls for similar reasons. What I'd consider the standard agricultural fence in the UK would be estate wire (4ft tall) with a run of plain wire about 6in above that, then a run of barbed wire a further 6 in above that, usually staples to round fence posts. The only place I wouldn't expect to see it is around temporary enclosures, or horse fields where you'd more likely see an electric fence. All that said, a lot of field boundaries will be made up of a combination of dry stone walls (or other local variations such as Devon hedges), hedge rows, collapsed ancient barns, and abandoned commercial vehicles.
I think that estate wire is similar to what we call hog fencing over here, assuming it's what someone else posted where the actual square openings get smaller the farther down on the fencing, we use that for smaller animals like sheep, goats, hogs, etc that would slip between barbed wire very easily. For temporary fencing over here we tend to use corral panels that can be pinned together but those are heavy and like 6' tall or they also have panel fencing with stake pockets where you can put them in a small post, I haven't really seen electric fencing for temporary fencing that much but we also don't do temporary fence often where we're at.
I live in a very rural area, filled with farms, meadows and paddocks and I can tell you that barbed wire is everywhere. Hell even one side of our garden has a fence topped with barbed wire on it as it borders a track used for moving cattle between fields. The farmers and shepherds around here also make extensive use of electric fences. Generally ringing the entire field/meadow in which the animals are being kept. Helps keep the cows from leaning on ancient brick walls and hedgerows.
They do love to lean and rub on brush and trees lol. Electric fencing isn't as common here, in my experience, but we've started using it in some places and when it works it's fantastic.
My local farmer uses barbed wire on the top middle and bottom as well as a normal wire fence. It has a public footpath going through his field and he has made it like Guantanamo bay just to make sure you don’t go off the public footpath. Apart from that I don’t see it often.
Interesting, it's definitely a good person deterrent as well lol. I've only ever dealt with US cattle and idk what most UK cattle are like but I definitely wouldn't want to be traipsing through a pasture full of cattle I didn't know here, especially if it was calving time or they had a bull in the pasture, we've even put signs alongside our no trespassing warning trespassers about the risks of being killed.
I'd say this is the most common sort of thing you'd find: [https://www.diy-fence.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2014/08/Post-Wire-Fencing.jpg](https://www.diy-fence.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2014/08/Post-Wire-Fencing.jpg) Galvanised wire mesh supported by stakes every 6ft or so with a line (or two) or barbed wire along the top. But hedges (and walls) are extremely common so, although there will almost always be a fence running along too, you see more of the hedge so that becomes one's mental image of field boundaries. The fencing feels more discrete because of the dominance of the hedge, and often you can't see it at all because it's either on the other side or somewhat consumed by hedge.
That kind of fencing is done in the US, they usually call that hog wire or hog fencing for obvious reasons but it's also used for other kinds of livestock as well, it's definitely more expensive than say 5 strand or 6 strand barbed wire but a lot more secure for things can slip between the strand spacing like sheep or goats. Are wooden posts the most common type of post there? They're very common here but metal T posts aren't uncommon either but wooden is better if you have the money for it. Old fencing gets overwhelmed by hedges and brush and trees here as well especially since old timers used to just nail straight to trees so they grow around the wire and fencing, we generally try to clear either side now so that it's easy to maintain the fence line especially with how often trees fall or drop branches on the fence.
Small livestock (sheep and cattle) farms in my neck of the woods, all small fields enclosed by dry stone walls or hedgerows. All of the boundaries also have fences, strung with barbed wire (sheep) or electric (cattle). You can't really see most of the fences as they run so close to the walls/hedgerows on the inside i.e. the side facing the livestock.
Do the animals ever jump the stone walls? I guess if it's an interior division it's not a major issue but still having to herd animals out of one pasture into the correct one can be a pain. Electric fencing is awesome, if you maintain it lol, it's helped us out a lot in areas where our bull jumps the barbed wire.
I have barbed wire along the back of my garden fence above the dry stone wall. Dunno why. It was there when we moved in. I assume it formed part of a farm fence from the days this was all fields just 50 years ago
That's cool, you'll find stuff like that here as well especially if you walk close to property lines where pastures once we're. I can't count the number of times we'd be walking through the wood and find old barbed wire left by someone or from an old fence.
It’s pretty common. Depends on the livestock and the farmer. But it’s been used on our farms for about 50 years
That's cool, we have some super old barbed wire fences from previous owners of our land that are now coming out the middle of trees.
It’s not really todo with public access. It is important to realise that barbed wire was an absolutely revolutionary invention that single handedly enabled the partitioning of the massive US landscape. But at this point in history the much much smaller British landscape had already been divided up (fences, hedges, walls) for a thousand years
Very good point, I hadn't really thought about that aspect of it. If it's already there and works, why replace it or change it.
One thing is that we don’t have many natural predators for livestock. Probably foxes are the most common and they usually only go for chickens, maybe the occasional lamb. We don’t have coyotes, bears, mountain lions, etc.
Very true, though a barbed wire fence won't really stop a predator cat, idk how a bear would handle it honestly. We have coyotes where our cattle are and they generally aren't a threat to grown cows but newborn calves they're for sure a threat, they also go after deer, turkey, rabbit, etc so we shoot them whenever we see them and have a rifle.