A Book of Britain: The Lore, Landscape and Heritage of a Treasured Countryside

As post-war policymakers sought for food sufficiency in the event of another war, thousands of kilometres of hedgerow planted during or before the Acts of Enclosure were bulldozed out to create larger, more efficiently cropped arable fields. Much of our ancient woodland disappeared during the massive forestry planting, driven by the government’s mania for self-sufficiency in timber products. In 1972 Britain joined the European Economic Community and, after a transitional period, agricultural policy fell within the remit of the Common Agricultural Policy, which encouraged wasteful food surpluses. With the ever-increasing drive for new technology in machinery, fertilisers, pesticides and crop production, the agricultural workforce declined and rural depopulation resulted. Only in the hills, where agricultural reclamations are virtually impossible, did farming remain much the same, but even here the effects of nylon textile were being felt as the wool price slid. The old saying, ‘the wool clip pays the rent or the shepherd’s wage,’ was but a happy memory and a hill farm that had once employed two shepherds could now only afford one.

AGRICULTURE HAS STEADILY DECLINED AS A LAND USE, DESPITE THE RISE IN DEMAND FOR HOME-GROWN AND ORGANIC FOOD, GIVING WAY TO LEISURE AND URBAN DEVELOPMENT. PATTERNS OF OWNERSHIP AND MANAGEMENT HAVE CHANGED, PARTICULARLY WITH VARIOUS TAX INCENTIVES DESIGNED TO ATTRACT NON-FARMERS TO BECOME LANDOWNERS.

During the nineties, persuaded as much by increasingly powerful conservation lobbies as the embarrassing situation of overproduction, the government began reversing the previous policies and, instead of paying farmers to intensify, they now paid them to put the countryside back the way it was. Agriculture has steadily declined as a land use, despite the rise in demand for home-grown and organic food, giving way to leisure and urban development. Patterns of ownership and management have changed, particularly with various tax incentives designed to attract non-farmers to become landowners. The complexities of the Common Agriculture Policy and fiercely competitive international food prices have led to a ridiculous situation where we have a population of 60 million and yet British agriculture provides less than 1 per cent of gross domestic products, employs only 2 per cent of the workforce and the majority of British farmers survive through a system of grants and subsidies.

It is important, however, that there is never a repeat of the government follies of the sixties and seventies. The British countryside should be a place where farmers can work and earn their living and the decision makers, whether here or in Brussels, must appreciate the fragility of our historic landscape. Farmers and landowners are the stewards of our countryside heritage, and between them own many miles of historic field boundaries, thousands of traditional farm buildings and most of the ancient archaeological sites. An enormous amount was lost during the post-war period of intensification and, once gone, they can never be replaced. Changes in attitude now provide an opportunity to prevent further destruction whilst allowing farmers to fulfil their historic role of feeding the nation.

CHAPTER TWO WOODLAND (#ulink_302444a8-cf54-5000-80bb-42e9247a081d)

Immediately after World War II, my father bought a farm in that lovely part of the High Weald in East Sussex, on the northern edge of the Ashdown Forest. This is a landscape of rolling hills, sandstone outcrops, little streams running through steep-sided ravines, scattered farmsteads with small, irregular-shaped medieval fields linked by sunken lanes and paths, amongst areas of ancient broadleaf woodland.

Some of my earliest memories are of my sister and me being taken on afternoon walks through the woods on the farm by our nanny, the redoubtable Nanny Pratt. The woods were a mix of coppiced ash, hornbeam and sweet chestnut, known as underwood, growing in clusters from single stools, and individual oak standards scattered about, trees allowed to grow for their timber without being coppiced. Nanny Pratt always carried a trug on our walks to put wild flowers in for the nursery or edible plants, berries and nuts. In the early spring, she would look for wild garlic plants growing in damp glades or the banks of the little streams, where the water ran reddish brown from iron ore deposits in the local clay. By May the woodland floor was a carpet of bluebells, wood anenomes, woodruff, wood sorrel, and shiny-leaved Dog’s Mercury, wild arum, white hellebore, little purple orchids and wood spurge. As the summer wore on, herb bennet, primroses, foxgloves, fig-wort, meadowsweet and purple-flowered Enchanter’s Nightshade could be found.

The woods were a haven for wildlife and a constant source of delight and fascination. A stick poked among leaf litter would be guaranteed to produce something of interest: a disgruntled ground beetle, his glossy blue-black carapace glinting in the sunlight; a Longhorn beetle with waving antennae; or a thrilling, fast-moving Wolf spider. Even woodlice and millipedes had their entertainment value. There were hoverflies, brightly coloured weevils, caterpillars, and where the sun shone through the overhang, any number of beautiful woodland butterflies-White Admirals, Purple Emperors, Commas – and a whole range of woodland fritillaries. Nuthatches or tree creepers scuttled up and down the trunks of the old standard trees and we would often hear the rasping curse of a jay or the silly laugh of a green woodpecker. Cock pheasants might be seen scratching for food on one of the bridle paths and there was always a background of twittering, whistling little woodland birds such as chiffchaffs, warblers, tits, robins, wrens and blackcaps. We might see a hedgehog rootling for slugs, an adder curled up asleep on a sunny bank or find ourselves watched by a timid roe deer. In the autumn, when the leaves turned golden and the ferns began to die back, fungi would appear. Clumps of yellow honey fungus, beefsteak, velvet shank or beech tuft on old stumps; oyster mushrooms, chanterelles, boleti, Caesar’s mushrooms, morels, puffballs and sometimes fly agaric and death cap. To all of these, Nanny Pratt would cry, ‘Don’t you go near them.’ Autumn was nutting time, when the trug was filled with clusters of hazelnuts in their little green caps, sweet chestnuts or blackberries and rose hips. Winter was my favourite time of the year. I loved the silence of the woods, the long shadows and the stark eeriness of bare trees, the red, citron, russet, black, bronze or copper of fallen leaves and the musty, mouldy smell of decay.

Sometimes, when the frost was hard on the ground, we would smell wood smoke and come across the farm men coppicing chestnut trees for fencing stobs. They would cut the poles to length and stack the ‘cords’ to dry until the following winter, or split dry poles from the previous year with sledge hammers and chisels, loading the split wood onto a four-wheeled box wagon, whilst the carthorses stood patiently in the shafts. The woods were coppiced on a rotational cycle and the areas to be cut were known as coups. Hazel was coppiced every six to eight years, chestnut every ten to fifteen years, ash every twenty, hornbeam twenty-five, and oak, around fifty years.

One winter, a family of charcoal burners set up camp in Drew’s Rough, a hornbeam wood to the north of the farm, cutting and stacking the wood to dry for burning. Their arrival was an endless source of rumour and gossip among the farm men: charcoal burners lived in huts made of turfs and were worse than gypsies for thievery and poaching. They ate badgers, hedgehogs, squirrels, snails and little woodland birds which they caught with bird-lime made from fermented holly bark; were immune to the bites of adders, which they caught with their hands, skinning them and selling the fat to people who believed it cured deafness and rheumatism. I thought they sounded fascinating, and my one ambition was to be taken to visit the camp, but needless to say, as far as Nanny Pratt and indeed everyone else on the farm was concerned, Drew’s Rough was a place to be avoided.

In the early spring, Nanny Pratt took her annual fortnight’s holiday and she was replaced by a young woman from an agency. By then, all anxieties over the charcoal burners had been forgotten. They kept to the wood and were rarely seen; nothing had been reported stolen, nor had any of them been caught poaching. With my sister away, there was no one to contradict me when I suggested to Miss Knowles that Drew’s Rough would be a pleasant place for our afternoon walk. I did not actually know where the charcoal burners were working, and I suspect that my curiosity would have been satisfied by simply watching them unobserved from the safety of the trees, if we ever found their camp.

As it happens, one moment we were ambling along the old, sunken, leaf-filled drove road that ran through Drew’s Rough and the next we came round a bend to find ourselves in a clearing, where the filthiest man I had ever seen was shovelling earth onto a circular pile of logs. A horse and cart laden with cut cords was being led down a track into the clearing by another man, whilst a third loaded cords from a stack onto a wheelbarrow with four uprights rather than a body, known as a ‘charcoal burners’ mare’. There were the remains of a fire that had burnt down, with a heap of hessian gunny sacks filled with charcoal beside it, partially covered by a tarpaulin. Across the clearing, where the ground rose, were several huts made of poles, turfs and canvas, shaped like wigwams. A blackened cooking pot hung on a tripod in front of them, and nearby two children played with a scruffy mongrel chained to a stake. Until now, the men had been concentrating on their work and we might have slipped away unnoticed, but the dog saw us and started to bark; two women emerged from the huts and everyone stopped and stared at us.

We couldn’t leave now, so we walked across the clearing to the man with the shovel and the two women – Joe Botting, our gardener, told me later that charcoal burners’ women were known as ‘Motts’ – came down to join him. He wore the greasy wreckage of a trilby hat, Derby tweed trousers, hobnailed boots, a collarless flannel shirt and an old waistcoat. Everything – his unshaven face, neck, arms and his clothes – was black with charcoal grime. The two women were no cleaner; one was lank and sinewy, with dirty black hair hanging in a rope down her back, wearing a threadbare jersey, a man’s jacket and a thick tweed skirt, with her skinny bare legs thrust into a pair of cut-off gumboots. The other wore oily dungarees and an army greatcoat. Both of them, like the man, had dark obsidian eyes, smelt of stale wood smoke and seemed to have soot ingrained in their skin.

A BLACKENED COOKING POT HUNG ON A TRIPOD IN FRONT OF THEM, AND NEARBY TWO CHILDREN PLAYED WITH A SCRUFFY MONGREL CHAINED TO A STAKE. UNTIL NOW, THE MEN HAD BEEN CONCENTRATING ON THEIR WORK AND WE MIGHT HAVE SLIPPED AWAY UNNOTICED, BUT THE DOG SAW US AND STARTED TO BARK.

‘Good afternoon,’ said Miss Knowles, ‘We’re from the farmhouse. This is Major Scott’s son,’ succinctly establishing our credentials. This was met with a stony silence, whilst the three of them stared at us unnervingly. Then the skinny one said in a high, rasping voice, ‘Ooh, look at ‘im. Look at his hair, innit booful?’ In those days, I had a mop of blond curls which Nanny Pratt made me wear rather on the long side. I loathed them, because it made me look girlish. The skinny woman seemed to agree: ‘Innit a crime for a boy to have hair like that? What I wouldn’t give for curls like them.’ At this, she gave what was no doubt intended to be an encouraging smile, exposing the stumps of her teeth and, stretching her hands with their long, blackened fingernails towards me, attempted to fondle my hair. At that, my nerve broke and I ran squealing out of the clearing with her horrid cackling laughter ringing in my ears, back down the old drove road towards home. For years afterwards, I was plagued with nightmares of those hands reaching out for me and the clumping footsteps that followed as I ran through the leaves.

OUR WORKING BRITISH WOODLANDS

Timber was nature’s greatest gift to mankind, and coppicing is the oldest form of woodmanship, practised from the time early man discovered that the stump of a felled tree produced a self-renewing supply of timber, until well into the twentieth century. The earliest archaeological records of coppicing in Britain were discovered on the Somerset Levels in 1970, when peat diggers unearthed part of a wooden roadway, the timbers from which have been carbon dated to 3900 BC. The Sweet Track, named after its discoverer, Ray Sweet, extended across the waterlogged marshes between an island at Westhay and a ridge of high ground at Shapwick, a distance close to 2,000 metres. The track is one of a network that once crossed the Levels, connecting Neolithic island communities with each other. It is an elaborate structure, engineered from coppiced poles of ash, oak and lime driven into the swamp to support a walkway that mainly consisted of split oak planks laid end-to-end. The Sweet Track and archaeological remains of Neolithic hut construction clearly indicate that there was an existing culture of coppiced ash, oak, hornbeam and lime to provide straight poles of about 5 metres, for structural supports, with hazel rods and willow withies for wattle-and-daub walling.

There was, of course, no shortage of material; the British Isles were then almost completely covered in wildwood, except for the areas of salt marsh to the south-west and east, coastal sand dunes, wetlands and the high mountains of northern England, Wales and Scotland, where scrub gave way to heather. Gradually, during the 6,000 years since the Ice Age ended, Britain became colonised, first by the tundra tree species – birch, aspen, juniper, mountain ash and sallow – and then these were followed in more or less chronological order by pine, yew, hazel, alder, sessile and pedunculate oak, lime, wych elm, holly, ash, maple, wild cherry, crab apple, black poplar, beech and hornbeam. There was little or no hindrance to their growth; the nomadic hunter-gatherers of the Mesolithic period made less impact than the herbivores they hunted. Aurochs, elk, red deer and wild boar would have inhibited regrowth in clearings created by fallen trees and on large areas of land where poor soil type led to sparse woodland growth.

By the time of the Neolithic migration, the composition and structure of the wild wood would have varied considerably between the different regions of Britain, with a complex pattern of local variation reflecting differences in soil type and depth. Southern Britain would have been covered with oak woodland on relatively infertile soil; lime woodland probably dominated fertile, non-calcareous soil; ash woodland on calcareous soils; and alder in river valleys and wetlands. Further north, the woodland cover would have comprised pine, birch and oak; only the highest mountain peaks and most exposed areas would have remained unforested.

THE EARLY AGRICULTURISTS WERE INDUSTRIOUS PEOPLE, FELLING AREAS OF WILDWOOD TO CREATE FIELDS FOR THEIR ARABLE CROPS, OR BURNING AND SLASHING SCRUB IN AREAS OF POOR SOIL TO PRODUCE WOODLAND PASTURE FOR GRAZING. IN OTHER PARTS OF THE WILDWOOD ADJACENT TO SETTLEMENTS, TREES WERE COPPICED FOR BUILDING MATERIALS, FENCING AND FIREWOOD.

The Neolithic agrarian colonists arrived in Britain around 4500 BC, bringing with them sheep, goats, cattle, pigs and primitive crops such as eikhorn wheat and Hordeum barley. They established little communities on the easily drained soils of the upland hills and on the coastal plains, avoiding the thickly wooded valley bottoms. These early agriculturists were industrious people, felling areas of wildwood to create fields for their arable crops, or burning and slashing scrub in areas of poor soil to produce woodland pasture for grazing. In other parts of the wildwood adjacent to settlements, trees were coppiced for building materials, fencing and firewood. The climate was consistently warm and dry, and over a period of 2,000 years Neolithic farmers spread throughout the British Isles, clearing woodland, reclaiming land and leaving monuments to their permanence in the form of monoliths, long barrows, causeway camps and henges. The areas of heaviest settlement were the chalk hills of the south and west, the Somerset Levels, coastal Cumbria and in East Anglia, particularly the Breckland where the shallow sandy soil was ideal for basic crop production and where most of the wildwood was cut down.

A new wave of settlers, known as the Beaker People from their common use of a distinctive, inverted, bell-shaped, pottery drinking cup, arrived from the Continent in about 2100 BC, bringing with them the knowledge of refining metal and how to make charcoal. Burning wood in the absence of oxygen to create carbon for fuel had been practised in Europe and the Middle East for many centuries, and initially the smiths used their skills to smelt copper that was surface mined in Devon, Cornwall, Cheshire and Wales – particularly the Great Orme mine at Llandudno in North Wales – and extensive copper mines in Ireland. Britain had large resources of tin in the West Country and lumps of cassiterite, tin oxide, were easily found in the mud of streams in places such as the Carnon Valley in Cornwall, washed downstream from outcropping lodes.

The Beaker smiths discovered that the heat generated from charcoal was capable of melting tin and that tin mixed with copper produced bronze, a much harder, more versatile material than the individual components. This was the beginning of the period of prosperity known as the Bronze Age, and by around 1600 BC the south-west of Britain was experiencing a trade boom as British tin and bronze was exported across Europe. At much the same time, the climate was deteriorating; where once the weather was warm and dry it became cooler and wetter as the Bronze Age continued, forcing the population away from easily defended sites in the hills and into the fertile wooded valleys. Bronze Age man now had the tools for large-scale forest clearance and farms of considerable size developed in the lowlands. Their wealth enabled the second and third stages of the building of Stonehenge and is reflected in the artefacts found in the richly furnished graves that have been excavated across Wiltshire.

When the Celts arrived in 800 BC, they found quite large farming communities in the fertile valleys on the edge of dense wildwood. These were predominantly cereal farms with some sheep, goats, pigs and cattle. The great lime woods of the southern half of England had been largely replaced by oak, ash, hornbeam or hazel, and areas adjacent to settlements were managed for coppicing, with newly cut coupes protected from livestock and deer by dead hedges – coppice trash woven between stakes driven into the ground. Pigs would be driven into the woods to rootle and graze by day, and cattle onto areas of wood that were common on poorer, higher ground. The Celts introduced their own improved agricultural techniques, particularly with arable farming, introducing oats, rye, millet and the more productive spelt and emmer wheat species. Fields and paddocks were laid out in regular, rectilinear patterns and fertilisation, in the form of chalk, mast, loam and marl, was used for the first time. The uplands that had been abandoned by their Bronze Age predecessors were re-occupied by pastoralists who created grazing by clearing the scrub and felling trees that had naturally reseeded.

THE CELTS INTRODUCED THEIR OWN IMPROVED AGRICULTURAL TECHNIQUES, PARTICULARLY WITH ARABLE FARMING, INTRODUCING OATS, RYE, MILLET AND THE MORE PRODUCTIVE SPELT AND EMMER WHEAT SPECIES. FIELDS AND PADDOCKS WERE LAID OUT IN REGULAR, RECTILINEAR PATTERNS AND FERTILISATION, IN THE FORM OF CHALK, MAST, LOAM AND MARL, WAS USED FOR THE FIRST TIME.

The Celts were also skilled metallurgists, bringing with them the knowledge of making iron and mining lead, gold and silver. Lead and silver were found at Chewton Mendip in Somerset, Machen in South Wales, Pentre in the north, Shelve Hill in Shropshire and Crich in Derbyshire. Gold was panned in the stream beds around Dolaucothi, Gwynfydd and Clogan, in Wales, and dug for among the gravel washed into the valley bottoms. Copper and tin continued to be mined in Wales and the West Country, but it was iron that kept the new migrants busiest and gave its name to the era. Iron ore was surface-mined all over Britain where clay or greensand was the predominant soil type, but two of the most important areas were the Forest of Dean in Gloucestershire and part of Monmouthshire, and the Weald of Sussex and Kent, the heavily wooded area which lies between the North and South Downs. Iron nodules, easily extracted from the local greensand and sticky Wealden clay, were smelted in charcoal-fired bloomery furnaces to produce wrought iron. There was a considerable industry on the northern edge of the Ashdown Forest in iron ore smelting, coppicing and charcoal manufacture. At the time of the Roman invasion, seven hill forts and over half the thirty-three Iron Age workings in Britain were recorded in this corner of the Weald.

BRITAIN’S CHANGING LANDSCAPE

A considerable amount of the original wildwood had been cleared for farmland by the time of the Roman occupation, but there were still vast areas of dense, tangled woodland across most of Britain. The landscape would not have changed very much in the previous seven centuries or have looked very different to that which the Celts found. Most of the woodland had gone from the chalk downland and along the valleys of the great rivers, with a patchwork of managed woodland and farmland on the edges of vast areas of wildwood elsewhere. Some settlements, particularly where minerals were mined, extended deep into the great wooded areas, such as the Weald in Kent and Sussex, the Forest of Dean in Gloucestershire, Grovelly in Wiltshire, and Rockingham in Northamptonshire, to name only a few. Throughout the country there were the heaths, moorland, marshes, wetlands and bare uplands, where graziers kept their flocks.

From the moment they arrived and throughout the 400 years of their occupation, the Romans required an immense quantity of wood. In fact, had it not been for the availability of this essential raw material, it is doubtful whether the gold, silver, tin, copper, lead, iron and other commodities which Britain had to offer would have been sufficient inducement to invade. The immediate requirement of the 40,000 legionnaires and auxiliaries, when they landed in AD 43, was timber to build new forts or to re-fortify existing ones that had been abandoned by the retreating Celts. Around ten hectares of woodland went into the construction of each fort and literally hundreds were built as the army advanced through Britain. Once the tribes had been subjugated, hectares more woodland were required in scaffolding, as permanent defences were built.

This was only the beginning; with the country becoming relatively settled, coppiced underwood was needed for all general building and mature trees for the great timber-framed urban buildings, rural villas, the numerous bridges of the road networks and ships of the navy. Fuel was necessary for basic domestic heating, brick and pottery kilns, corn dryers and for their extensive estuarine salt pans in places such as the Cooling Marshes at the mouth of the Thames or the brine springs around Northwich, Middlewich and Nantwich in Cheshire. Oak bark was in very high demand for the tanneries, and Roman mining operations were on an industrial scale not seen again until the sixteenth century. The historian Dr Oliver Rackham has estimated that charcoal from over 9,300 hectares of coppiced wood was needed to fuel the military ironworks in the Weald alone.

Considerable areas of wildwood were cleared to accommodate the large estates which now dominated the farming system, with their extensive cattle ranches, big sheep flocks and sufficiently improved cereal production to allow a surplus to be exported. Highly sophisticated methods of sylviculture were introduced, which enabled the Romans to manage the woodlands efficiently and meet the enormous demands on an inevitably limited natural resource. They were, of course, able to draw on experience acquired over centuries of woodland management elsewhere in the Empire and the knowledge of the most respected agriculturalists of the period, such as Lucius Columella, author of De arboribus and Rutilius Palladius, author of Opus agriculturae. The centuries-old system of coppicing woodland of mixed underwood and standards allowed to grow to maturity was continued, but in a much more productive manner. The Romans established a variety of cereal, vegetable, herb, fruit and tree species, the most important of which to sylviculture was sweet chestnut. Chestnut became one of the most valued coppicing timbers, and Stour Wood, an ancient chestnut wood near Harwich, is believed to grow on the site of a Roman chestnut plantation.

With the collapse of the Roman Empire and expulsion of the Roman civilian administrators around AD 410, the Romano-British were left to fend for themselves in a country besieged by barbarians from all sides. The Picts and Scots swarmed hungrily over the abandoned Hadrian’s Wall; Angle, Jute and Saxon pirates harassed the coastal communities from the Tyne to the Tamar, whilst Norwegian and Irish raiders periodically amused themselves along the west coast from the Mersey to the Solway. Vortigern, the fifth-century king of the Britons, has been blamed for making matters considerably worse by employing Saxon mercenaries to fight for him and paying them with grants of land. In a relatively short space of time, the numbers of mercenaries had grown to a level where they were powerful enough to rebel, capturing the south-east lowlands and throwing the door open to a general invasion. For the next couple of centuries, Britain was plunged into a series of wars as Britons either fled to Brittany, hence the name, or were forced into Cornwall, parts of Scotland and the hills of Wales.

There is no doubt that during the Dark Ages of early Anglo-Saxon Britain, almost every advance in civilisation introduced by the Romans was reversed. The great urban buildings, country villas, bath houses and temples were allowed to collapse, and with no central government, the industries that had once made Britain prosperous were neglected. The population, estimated at four million towards the end of the Roman occupation, rapidly fell to around two million. A natural consequence of this drop in population was a rapid expansion in woodland, which follows a simple law of nature overlooked by conservationists today, with their mania for planting: land left unused will inevitably become invaded by trees. In many areas, farms that had been laboriously reclaimed from woodland were gradually overtaken by secondary growth and intensively managed woods reverted to their natural form.

Successive waves of the invaders pushed inland, creating fortified farming communities under petty chieftains along the fertile river valleys and on the edges of immense woodland, such as the Weald and the Forest of Dean, the great woods around London and what is now Stansted airport, the Chiltern plateau, and those in Worcestershire, Warwickshire, Cheshire, Derbyshire, the Lake District and Wiltshire, in much the same way as the Celts had done before them. Saxon farming communities had the same essential requirements from woodland; they built their houses and even their principal buildings from wood. They needed wood for basic fuel, fencing, for the salt works and mines, and as the population expanded farmland was extended at the expense of trees. Woodland was coppiced in the same way as it had been by previous generations to provide a self-replenishing supply of easily handled poles, with mature trees among the underwood for beams and planks.

In the years after 1066 the woodlands provided a vital part of the whirlwind programme of castle building instigated by William the Conqueror, as he sought to suppress the populations of regional centres by creating a network of fortified power-bases. Over a period of twenty years, at least 1,000 wooden motte-and-bailey fortifications and 87 stone castles were built. Both the Crown and the Church sought to assert their authority over the populace by constructing many hundreds of imposing castles or magnificent abbeys – between 1130 and 1280 the Cistercians alone built 86. Construction on this scale required a phenomenal amount of trees, and buildings in general continued to be the single biggest use of timber for many centuries. Three-quarters of the building timber used was oak, the most common species of coppiced wood, with some ash, elm and aspen.

The majority of buildings were made from large numbers of relatively small trees, about 30 centimetres in diameter and probably no more than 6 metres in length. There were a variety of reasons for this: woodland management was designed to provide a rapid turnover of self-sustaining materials, and a standard growing amongst underwood would reach about six metres before branches or the crown developed, providing a tree that was easy to fell, extract and transport and a trunk which did not require much carpentry and could be adzed into shape. Larger trees were expensive to move, difficult for early saws to cut through lengthwise, and were generally reserved for castles, cathedrals and great houses.

All English wood was deciduous hardwood, and from the middle of the thirteenth century the very rich began to panel the interior of their houses with softwood boards imported from the Baltic. Known as deal, there are references as early as 1250 of deal boards for panelling in the accounts for the building of Windsor Castle and of Norwegian pine scaffolding in the early 1300s during the building of Ely Cathedral’s octagonal ‘Lantern Tower’. During the Tudor period, an increased demand for bigger timber led to Henry VIII passing a statute which required woods to be enclosed after cutting, to prevent regrowth being damaged by browsing animals, and thirty trees to be left in each hectare, to be grown into timber.

TIMBER – NATURE’S MOST USEFUL GIFT

There was, of course, an infinite number of uses for every part of each woodland species. Oak was by far the most abundant standard tree, although other species such as ash were occasionally allowed free growth. Every soil type and region had characteristic combinations of coppice species. These included hazel and ash on the Midland clays, beech and sessile oak on Western sandstone, and lime in central Lincolnshire. Hornbeam and sweet chestnut grew widely in the south-east, while local or minor underwood species included whitebeam, wild cherry, crab apple, maple, alder and elm. Some underwood species were particularly suited to specialised uses, and there was some selection in favour of these, but most coppice woodland included a mix of trees to serve a variety of local needs.

COMMON OAK

The common oak, although widely distributed over Europe, is regarded as a peculiarly English tree. It was for many centuries the principal woodland tree in England and is intimately bound up with the history of these islands. As timber, its particular and most valued qualities are its resilience, elasticity and strength, and oak has long been a symbol that reflects the hardiness of the British people. King Edward’s Chair, also sometimes known as ‘St Edward’s Chair’ or ‘The Coronation Chair’, is the throne on which British monarchs sit for their coronation. It was commissioned in 1296 by King Edward I to be carved in oak and designed to contain the Stone of Destiny, the coronation stone of Scotland, below the seat. (This was returned to Scotland in 1996, on the condition that it is sent down to England whenever there is a coronation.)

In the mining areas of Britain coppiced oak was primarily cut for manufacturing charcoal, but there was also a huge demand for the hard, tight-grained, flexible timber in both house and ship-building, particularly by the navy during the Napoleonic Wars. A large ship of the line in Nelson’s navy, carrying between 70 and 100 guns with a ship’s company of over 1,000 officers and men, required timber from 3,500 standard oak trees. In 1805, at the time of the Battle of Trafalgar, the navy alone consisted of 128 ships of the line, 35 gun vessels, 145 frigates, 400 sloops and a host of smaller craft. Apart from fuel, charcoal, and engineering structures where strength and durability were required, or building and boat materials, oak had a mass of other uses. The best fencing was made from oak coppice which was split lengthwise and it was in constant demand by cabinetmakers, joiners, wagonmakers, wheelwrights and in particular by coopers. In the great days of pioneering rail travel, oak was as popular as ash for making railway carriages and goods wagons. Oak sawdust was used to impart a delicious flavour to York hams, and oak galls, the nodules formed where a gall wasp lays her eggs, were used for making ink and treating gonorrhoea. Blacksmiths traditionally used – and still do – the root stump of an oak for an anvil base, and the oak was universally regarded as the best of all barks for tanning.

SESSILE OR SCRUB OAK

In the uplands of the north of England and Scotland, birch and sessile oak were by far the most common species, dominating both the underwood and canopy of the coppiced woodland. Where the uplands turn into hills, and growing conditions become more difficult, standards grew too slowly and erratically to be worth fostering, so ‘scrub oak’ coppice without standards developed. Much of this was used for tanbark or charcoal and thousands of acres of scrub oak used to grow across the hills of the Scottish Borders, before it was cleared and the sheep inhibited further regrowth. In 1804, during the Napoleonic Wars, there was a belief that the French might attempt an invasion at Berwick-upon-Tweed, and a system of beacons was built across southern Scotland, to be fired in the event of a landing. On the night of 31 January a sergeant in the Berwickshire Volunteers on duty in Hume Castle at Greenlaw, which commands a spectacular view across the Tweed valley, mistook the twinkling of charcoal burners’ fires on the distant Cheviots for the vanguard of the enemy. He promptly lit his beacon and the result was the inglorious incident known as the ‘Great Alarm’, in which beacons were mistakenly lit in turn right across the Borders, and several thousand volunteers rushed to repel a French army that didn’t exist.

THE COOPER’S CRAFT

Coopers were once numerous and independent craftsmen, whose highly skilled craft was acquired only through years of practice. Until a century ago, virtually every village had at least one cooper, with an apprentice serving the standard seven-year apprenticeship. Their role was to supply the village with rounded watertight recipients that were able to withstand stress from rolling and weight from stacking. These ranged from buckets and pails for milk and water, to barrels, casks and kegs of every size for liquids, transporting goods or storing salt, pickled food, oil and flour. In the towns and cities, the breweries each had a cooperage making barrels that started with a 4.5 gallon polypin and then doubled in capacity through firkin, kilderkin, barrel, hogshead and butt to the mighty 216 gallon tun. With commercial whisky distilling, after the Excise Act of 1823, every highland distillery had its own cooperage and a Master Cooper who oversaw the manufacture of barrels which would remain watertight for the whisky maturing process – often for over twenty-five years. In the mid-twentieth century, stainless steel and aluminium barrels became prevalent in beer making, but some specialist real ale breweries do continue to make beer in wooden barrels. Wadworth of Devizes in Wiltshire, who employ the last remaining Master Cooper in England, is an example. In Scotland, whisky is still matured in oak barrels where the tannins in the wood play an essential role in maturation, by enabling oxidation and the creation of delicate fragrance in spirits. In the village of Craigellachie, near Aberlour, in Scotland, the Speyside Cooperage produces and repairs nearly 150,000 oak casks used by the surrounding Speyside Whisky distilleries, as well as distilleries elsewhere throughout Scotland.

It is generally accepted that the Celtish tribes of the wooded Alpine region of Germany were the first people to make barrels, in around 300 BC, and the basic structure has remained more or less unchanged. Sections of oak trunks, from trees ideally aged 100 to 150 years old, are split along the grain into staves, bent and stacked in the open for between 18 and 36 months to enable the wood to dry evenly in the air. The manufacturing process requires the use of a number of well-seasoned oak staves enclosing a circular head at either end of the cask, and then bound together with steel or copper hoops. The skill of the cooper lies in making each stave, precisely shaped and bevelled, to form the tight-fitting circle of the belly of the cask.

The staves are trimmed into oblong lengths with a double taper, traditionally called ‘dressing’, then joined on a jointer known as a ‘colombe’ and given their final shape before being fitted onto a frame and arranged around an iron ‘raising up’ hoop. The shaping requires heat to modify the wood’s physical and chemical composition, which is provided by natural gas, steam or boiling water, or flames from burning wood chips, or a combination of these. If fire is used the barrel is assembled over a metal pot called a ‘chaufferette’. The cooper hammers home temporary iron hoops whilst pressing the wood with a damp cloth. The barrel heads, comprising five or six straight staves pinned together, are shaped to fit into a groove known as the ‘croze’, which is cut in the inside ends of the side staves. To finish, the outside is planed smooth and the barrel is filled with steam or water: if it is watertight the bunghole is drilled and the iron hoops are replaced with steel or copper ones.

ALDER

Alder, often seen lining the banks of streams and rivers or forming small alder woods known as ‘carrs’ on damp ground, was an immensely useful, fast-growing, multi-purpose tree. The tightly grained wood has the quality of long endurance under both fresh and sea water, and was invaluable for pumps, troughs, sluices and water pipes. The medieval conduits bringing fresh water into London were made using alder and it was still used for piping in the eighteenth century. In fact, examples of alder water pipes from the reign of Charles II, excavated from Oxford Street in 1899, can be seen at the Powerhouse Museum in London’s Chinatown.