The hurdle as the shepherd's primary tool of portable enclosure — the woven hazel panel that could be carried to any part of the farm and erected quickly into a temporary pen — represents the intelligence and flexibility of traditional pastoral management; A poet might write "he built the fold from hurdles as his father had, each panel lifted and slotted into the next, the circle of woven hazel rising against the night like a small completed argument"; In athletic poetry the hurdle race provides a different and energetic set of images — the obstacle to be jumped, the barrier that tests speed and agility — and poets can move between the agricultural and athletic meanings for ironic or surprising effect; The fragility of the hurdle — woven from flexible rods rather than cut from solid timber — makes it an image of temporary order, the fence that must be actively maintained and that cannot resist determined pressure for long; The craft of hurdle-making — the skilled weaving of hazel rods by the hurdle-maker, a specialist whose skill was essential to every sheep farm — appears in poems about traditional crafts and their disappearance, the specific knowledge required to make a good hurdle now largely lost; In pastoral elegies the dismantled hurdle — the portable fence packed away at the end of the season, the temporary enclosure dissolved back into its component parts — serves as an image of the impermanence of all pastoral order.