I was just trying to explain this to my niece last week. She responded along the lines of how messy the English language is, but my counter argument was that it highlights the flexibility of language, which allows its use to be artistic as well as functional to a degree that's entirely at the discretion of the speaker / writer.
Martin Gardner came up with a somewhat contrived but still brilliant extension to this:
"Wouldn't the sentence 'I want to put a hyphen between the words Fish and And and And and Chips in my Fish-And-Chips sign' have been clearer if quotation marks had been placed before Fish, and between Fish and and, and and and And, and And and and, and and and And, and And and and, and and and Chips, as well as after Chips?"
"The horse raced past the barn fell" is embedded just one level deep. Besides it becoming completely unintelligible, there's nothing to say that you can't nest arbitrarily:
The dog the cat the mouse liked hated barked.
Of course, language isn't prescriptive, so it's arguable if this is allowed. It's grammatical, in a technical sense, but not acceptable to, I'd imagine, most English speakers.