Coppicing

I like coppicing as it is not only good exercise in fresh air but also a way of prolonging the life of a tree and as a student of history I find it incredible that coppicing, as a means of woodland management has been in existence for approximately 4,000 years. Our iron age ancestors coppiced woods, timber from coppiced  woods has been used for construction for as long as mankind has been able to build. So an iron age roundhouse has as much in common with the grandest of Elizabethan houses in terms of basic support.  Can this be proved? The answer is  yes,  as any dendrochronologist worth his or her salt will be able to accurately age the timbers in a building and from this a number of suppositions can be made.

We can safely surmise that coppicing has played a part in significant historical events, many of which have transformed the world geographically, metaphysically and politically. What do I mean by this? Quite simply without wood from managed sources the world would be a different place as where would Romans have sourced wood to build boats in which they carried out the invasion of ancient Britain in 55 BC?  Would a man perhaps called Jesus Christ perhaps have been hung up on a wooden cross and had such a dramatic impact on Western thought? Would there have been a Peloponnesian War? Would the Vikings have built their longships and invaded England in 900 AD? Would gunpowder production, which was dependent on a good supply of wood for charcoal production have continued, leading to modern developments in ballistics? Thankfully we will never have to worry too much about the answers to these questions. Nonetheless it is worth pointing out to the sceptics in our technological age who doubt the importance of woodlands, that the Forestry Commission was created as recently as 1919, with the express purpose of managing woodland such that Great Britain would have sufficient timber to meet future wartime requirements.

What then is coppicing and why has it had such an impact on the  development of woodlands? Put simply coppicing is cutting down a tree and  leaving a stump or stool to grow shoots. These shoots will eventually become trunks or to the cognoscenti, ‘rods’ from which fence posts, rails and gates will be made. Even the wood that cannot be used for fencing has a use as it either becomes part of the deer/ rabbit defences erected round the coppiced stools or is added to the pile of waste wood to be made into charcoal or simply put in the log burner at a later date. The frequency with which trees are coppiced is really dependent on how big the woodland owner wants his rods to be so some coops (collective name for coppiced trees) are managed on a 5 year cycle, some on a 7 and some on a 10. I have even found a woodland that was coppiced on a 15 year cycle but this is fairly unusual.

In general any tree apart from conifers can be coppiced but some are or have been favoured over others as the properties of wood varies from species to species. The ideal woods for construction for example  are hard so varieties such as  Oak, Sycamore, Holly and Beech remain very popular. Softer woods such as Alder or Willow were used to make charcoal suitable for black powder manufacture, about which I will say more in my next blog entry.

This

becomes this

which become this after only one year!