The band had performed the song on the 1969 launch of From the Roundhouse, a short-lived BBC television youth and arts programme about the London "underground scene".
The song's title came from a large, low-hanging tree limb on which Richard Thompson used to play as a child, and which he and his friends had dubbed "The Ledge".
Fairport Convention re-recorded the song in 1987, releasing it as a track on the album In Real Time: Live '87 and as a single to tie in with the band's 20th anniversary.
In 2012, American rock band Counting Crows recorded a version of the song for their covers album, Underwater Sunshine (or What We Did on Our Summer Vacation).
In 2022, UK comedy-folk band The Bar-Steward Sons of Val Doonican recorded a version of the song as the hidden track of their eleventh album Rugh & Ryf (itself a parody of Fairport Convention's Liege & Lief).